The Big Yellow, WaHo, La Casa de Waffle, Beezlebub, the Devil has many names – wait, most of those are actually names for Waffle House, which is kind of like the devil though, in that, um, they have hot things there, and, uh, people there can be weird, and ooh, the people who work there might have goat legs, but you can’t tell because they’re always behind that counter.  So yeah, Waffle House, it’s not really like the devil much at all, which is probably a good thing, because I hang out there a lot.  Now some of you, I fear, may not have ever experienced the absolutely insane awesomeness of Waffle House.  Maybe you live in one of those accursed parts of the country where all there are are Ihops, maybe you were raised by wolverines (or possibly tangerines, or some other foresty -ines thing), maybe you’ve heard that Waffle House was just really sketchy.  But you know, the people who say that are only doing it to score you off because Waffle House is so awesome they don’t want to have to share it with you, waffle neophyte that you are.  In any case, I thought I’d use my unparalleled influence over the internet to work for the good of humanity, for once, so tonight I’m gonna try to give y’all a virtual tour of La Casa de Waffle.  So buckle your seatbelts, and put on your +2 Helmet of Surly Waitress Evasion, cause he we go.

            Now, the first thing you have to know about Waffle House is that it’s kind of like a cemetery is for goth kids; it’s there all day long, but you’ll miss all the grooviness if you go during the day.  Also, it can be kind of spooky, and you might have to fight off vampires.  So should you happen to plan your maiden voyage to Waffle House as a consequence of reading this blog, make sure you go on a night when you have absolutely nothing important to do the next day.  The reason behind this is simple, at night, you only get the real hardcore Waffleheads there.  Like, if Waffle House was Star Wars, the people who go there at three in the morning would all be dressed as Princess Leia, though in truth, some of them are anyway.

            What does one order at Waffle House?  Well, if you didn’t get waffles, that would just be weird.  I mean, would you go to Linens n’ Things, and not buy any N’ Things?  Would you go to Mongolia and not buy a Yak?  I think not.  So when you go to Waffle House, get a Waffle.  And you can order one with strawberries or beef jerky on it or whatever, but whatever you do, don’t go all Meg Ryan on them and start trying to get some funky customized waffle, and be all asking whether or not it contains hydrogenated soybean oil.  This is Waffle House, and they’ll shun you so hard you’ll fly through the window and wake up in Amish Country.  Also, if you’re one of the many people who hate to waste time sleeping but are afraid to buy powerful illegal stimulants off of Ebay, order a cup of the coffee there.  Just don’t listen to it while you’re waiting for it to cool off, because it’s probably made out of demons and stuff.  You might also want to think about ordering a Texas Cheesesteak Sandwich, because they write “Texas” in the most provocatively awesome font ever.  I wish I could post it here, but it would make your monitor explode, so I’ll just describe it briefly and hope that you’re wearing something that’s resistant to flying shards of glass.  Imagine that some crazed Texan sciency guy (yes, it was probably George Bush) somehow managed to combine that font that they burn into cows, and like, the marquee of the Grand Old Opry.  Seriously, it just leaps off the menumat and smacks you metaphorically in the face.  You could be lactose intolerant, vegetarian, sandwich-hater from whatever state is the polar opposite of Texas (Vermont) and you’d still be unable to resist its evilly seductive deliciousity.

            Waffle House also comes equipped with a truly epic jukebox.  You see, due to budgetary reasons, or possibly just an overly literal interpretation of the It’s a Gift to Be Simple song, it only has one page of songs to choose from.  And since Waffle House is like some kind of giant metaphor for some other kind of thing, they’ve tried to diversify their music repertoire and ended up with about three songs from any given genre.  The only exceptions of course being songs about Waffle House (of which there are way too many), songs by CCR (which inexplicably seems to be it’s own genre, thereby earning a good three or four spots on the list, and Lindsey Lohan (who, even more inexplicably is apparently now an entire school of music, since she gets like, a whole column of jukebox choices).  So make sure you bring along a bag fulla quarters, so you can sit there for two hours listening to nothing but Fortunate Son and Lindsay Lohan Battles the Pink Robots.

            So there you go, all the reasons you’ve been waiting for to take a random road trip with one or more of your homies this very night down to the only place in town that exposes Ihop for the godless commie plot to destroy America that is truly is.  And if your monitor exploded back there in the Texas Cheesesteak Sandwich paragraph, I’d say I’m sorry, but since your monitor just blew up, you couldn’t read it anyway.

            You know how in The Lion King, when Simba finally reuturns home after years of eating bugs and hanging out with Timone and Pumba (clearly the R2-D2 and C3PO of the jungle, if you know what I mean), and his evil Uncle Dave has messed everything up?  How exactly did that happen anyway?  I mean, the savannah looks like some kind of a postindustrial wasteland of doom.  How did lions do that?  Did they stop eating gazelles and start opening up poorly managed petroleum refineries?  Did a radioactive meteorite crash there?  Seriously, despite the authority that comes with being King of the Beasts, when it comes to environmental regulation, your two choices are pretty much whether or not to eat all the other animals, and whether or not to keep that retarded baboon priest on staff; not whether or not to try to develop a self-sufficient petrochemical business while turning the wilderness into New Jersey.  On the other hand, if lions actually do have some way of completely messing up the environment when they feel like it, maybe we’d better go ahead and eat them all now, before they turn on us and usher in a global famine or something.

            As everybody knows, Two Face is just one of many thematically-unified Batman villains, because he carries a double-headed quarter.  But what if he accidentally got ahold of one of those new Kansas quarters?  If he wanted to keep his gimmick, he’d have to have a normal face on one side, and a buffalo on the other, which means he’d have to fall into a big vat of buffalo wings or something (because the surest way of getting freaky powers is to fall into a vat of something, just ask the Joker, Plastic Man, Clayface, or Henry Kissinger).

            You know how when scientifically referring to degrees of getting it on, we commonly use baseball as a guide (first base, second base, shortstop, guy in the stands selling hot dogs, whatever)?  What about people in those benighted countries without baseball?  Do people there just never talk about this sort of thing?  Or do they use more familiar sports?  I mean, how do you draw comparisons to say, polo (unless of course you really like horses)?  Maybe this is why populations in Europe are declining; they don’t have any good sports to compare stuff like this to.

            Why did they choose to name that magazine Ebony, anyways?  I mean, there are a lot of other sort of dark-colored woods that you could have chosen.  And then Hallmark has that line of greeting cards called Mahogany, but think of all the untapped wood potential (The Untapped Wood Potential, by the way, would make an awesome name for a band).  I for one would read a magazine called Wenge, or possibly Bocote.  And what about white people, don’t we get any xylonamous magazines and greeting cards?  I’d be willing to take out a subscription to, say, Tasmanian Eucalyptus Burl weekly, or send someone a card from a company called Tennessee Cheddar.

            I never shop at Abercrombie & Fitch.  This is party because I spend all my money on van and potato gun components, but also because all the pictures they have on the walls are of naked people.  It just seems weird, like being at a car dealership with a big picture of a guy riding a bike, or going to a video game store and having a picture of a guy on a date with a girl.  But there they are, all over the store, “Sigh, I’m so sexy I wish I were dead.  Pants make me sad, that’s why I don’t wear any,” they seem to say.  What kind of message does that send about having faith in the product you’re selling, if even your spokesmodels would rather be seen naked all over the Regency Square Mall and Battledome rather than wear your clothes.  Personally, I think this is related to the fact that Abercrombie & Fitch (which does at least give me a chance to use that little & key on my computer) used to sell cool stuff, like elephant guns.  One day though, back in the 80s, they realized that elephants can’t even own guns in this country anymore, and they decided to get into selling preppy garb.  Sadly, they were still kind of in elephant mode, and since pachyderms usually go about undressed, all their ad pictures are really big, with naked people cast in an elephantastic sort of gray. 

            Whenever I see the logo from “Friends”, I always wonder what all those periods are between all the letters.  Was “Friends” just not quite as long a word as they were hoping for, prompting the producers to fill it out a bit with unnecessary punctuation?  Would calling the show “A Bunch of People Who Sleep With Each Other and Don’t Have Real Jobs” been too long?  Or maybe “Friends” is actually an acronym of some sort, like the real name of the show was something like, “Franklin Roosevelt is Eating Ninety Dead Squirrels,” or “Fool! Retreat if Einstein Needs Doorknobs Soon!”

            Among the few invariably certain things in this ever-changing world of ours is the fact that Chewbacca totally rules.  I mean, who doesn’t like Chewbacca?  Probably only people like Hitler and Ashton Kutcher.  It is therefore nothing short of an event of unquestionable intergalactic significance that Chewbacca has at last decided to become a U.S. citizen.  I myself am somewhat lackluster in my keeping up with international affairs, but I didn’t even know that we had diplomatic ties with his home planet (the name of which escapes me at the moment, but I do know it starts with a K and has about 42 Ys in it).  Sure, in all the news articles about it, they say that Chewbacca is coming over here from England, but the way I see it, there are really only two possibilities concerning that problem.

            First, it might be the case that by England, they actually mean England, Chewbacca-World, like it’s a town there or something, and they just completely randomly ended up with that name by a total quirk of fate.  So in Wookiee, England probably means something like, “Land of the Venomous Mud Squirrels” (over here, of course, it simply means “Land of Engs,” whatever those are).  So, one can assume that he’s also coming here just to escape from a hometown with a silly name, much as people from Blueball, Pennsylvania, Medieval England, Iowa, and I’m A Big Fat Retard, Vermont have done since they were first founded by various fools and Amish people.

            The other possibility is that “Being from England” is actually just a codeword for being a space alien.  I’m sure there are way too many planets to keep track of out there, and even with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith on the case, people would freak out if they knew that Patrick Stewart is from Zebulon 9 in the Zookdar Nebula (to say nothing of the generally acknowledged fact that Alec Guinness really was from Tatooine after all, and rather than dying, he’s merely gone back home for a bit of a vacation).  In fact, how do we even know that England is even a real place.  I’ve never been there, and though I know folks who say they’ve been, they might be lying.  Or maybe it’s all really just a bunch of holograms out in a big underground bio-dome somewhere out in Nevada and everyone that we think is from England is actually a space alien like Chewbacca, C.S. Lewis, and Monty Python.  Which goes a long way, mind you, to proving that there are plenty of friendly aliens out there who aren’t addicted to Reese’s Pieces and Speak ‘n Spell, but still, I’m rather disappointed to know that this whole England thing has been such a farce.

            The other big question of course, is how Chewbacca got to be a U.S. citizen in the first place.  All that I was able to find out is that he’s marrying a woman from Texas (and, being as he is well over 200 years old, I’m sure his mom is all sorts of relieved to know he’s finally settling down).  Now, I tried to come up with an exhaustive list of all the single women in Texas that I know of, and the only ones I could think of were the Bush twins.  I personally never learned to tell the two of them apart, but assuming that Chewbacca’s not a Mormon or anything, we can safely say that he’s only marrying the one of them.

            The last thing I want to be doing is jumping to conclusions here, but it seems to me that since George Bush’s dad was President, and George Bush is President now, he’d probably really like it if his son could be President too someday.  Alas, having only daughters, the only way ol’ George’s dream is gonna come true is if he decides to settle for a son-in-law; which, of course, Chewbacca will now be.  Sure, you might think that since Chewie isn’t a native of this fine nation of ours, he can’t be elected President.  And that’s where Arnold Shwarzenegger comes in.

            For you see, it won’t be long before the American people, believing that they’re paving the way for the Terminator to reach the Presidency, actually play into the diabolically ingenious plans of the Republican Party by voting to amend the Constitution to allow Austrians and Wookiees to run for President.  Honestly, I’m not sure why exactly they’re going to such lengths to everyone’s favorite walking carpet elected, but I for one, and eager to see what kind of Supreme Court Justices he’ll nominate, as well as which diplomats he plans to beat to death with their own arms.

            If there’s a single comic in the daily papers that regularly and accurately depicts life in Canada, I would have to say that that comic is most certainly “Hagar the Horrible.”  If I had to choose a second one though, I’d probably have to go with “For Better of for Worse.”  Really, just about everything I know about Canada, I learned from reading this strip and from my friends on the streets (yeah, I grew up in a weird neighborhood, we’d all gather around behind the school and speculate wildly on the nature of Canada, which was a good thing, because when they brought in the school nurse to explain it to us it was so completely not as awesome).  So anyways, as usual, I was reading it this morning when I came upon this:

            Now, up until the last panel, this one makes a decent amount of sense (unlike Funky Winkerbean, which is more like taking a daily odyssey into some otherworldly realm of eternal torment and suffering), but then I stopped to look at the guys eyes and just totally freaked out (really, I did, right there at the breakfast table; I snarfed in my Hot Pocket and everything).  Why, you may ask?  Because, those are not the eyes of a man suffering from sleep deprivation, those are the eyes of a man who has been tainted with some ancient and nameless evil, and since it’s nameless, I’m gonna just call it Chuck.  For you see, I spent all of five years in college, studying the ways of history, potato guns, bad winemaking, and armoring, and along the way, I saw plenty of tired people and plenty of people possessed of Chuck, the ancient and (recently) nameless evil, and lemme tell you, the two look nothing alike.

            Which means, of course, that we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary here, for clearly For Better for Worse Guy has been doing than merely pulling a few all-nighters.  At first I suspected that, like so many other Canadians, he had been dabbling in the dark arts of necromancy and maple syrup refining, but then he would almost certainly have on some kind of a robe made out of Teddy Grahams boxes or knitted from the souls of the damned (which are more alike than you may be likely to suspect), but nope, he’s wearing a cardigan, which is like the official upper body garment of Canada.  They’re like apple pie to Canadians, except they usually don’t eat them.  Usually.  Also, he’d probably have tentacles growing out of his ears and there’d be demon monkeys flying around the apartment and stuff; which there aren’t.  Indeed, it seemed as if I would be left without a hope of unraveling the case of For Better For Worse Guy’s evil Chuck eyes, but then I remembered something else I had read concerning the most unlikeliest of connections.

            There was an article in the paper today, you see, which dealt with the growing business of mining the oils sands of Alberta, which, if I recall correctly, is probably in Canada (at the very least, I’m nearly almost positive it’s not in Paraguay).  And this is of course, all sorts of controversial since this mining is destroying huge tracts of Canada’s pristine god-forsaken frozen wastelands.  Critics counter that the only other option is to get oil by grinding up baby seals, which of course brings in all sorts of extremist factions that would rather get oil by grinding up other animals such as manatees, squirrels, and Ben Affleck, but that is neither here nor there.

            For you see, while many may argue about the environmental impact of oil sand mining, few care to address the real hazard here; that of hideous and nameless evils named Chuck that have been slumbering dreamlessly since ere the Earth had cooled, awaiting the day when man in all his hubris might awaken them to devour the Earth as a fat guy devours a case of Twinkies.  Why don’t these things happen here in the America?  Simple, because the planet is a lot narrower way up at the North and South poles, so all the evil is a lot closer to the surface.  Down here in more temperate climes, you have to dig way deeper to unleash unholy hell furies upon the human race, though from time to time, some old lady planting a flower bed will hit a rich vein of evil and get transformed into some kind of gibbering harpy beast or talk show host.

            So clearly, the Power of Chuck has been released out in Alberta and, wafting o’er the countryside like the evil from a succulent and delicious waffle, has infested Sleep Impaired For Better For Worse Guy, who, unfortunately, is now probably in the wretched thrall of the underworld.  One can only hope, from an objective point of view, that this will bring about much funnier comic strips in the coming weeks, as he goes all crazy like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, or Winfield Scott Hancock in Gettysburg.  Either way, only time will tell.

            Ever since the first nerd caveman took up his +7 Club of Cave Mastery, fashioned a crude pair of Vulcan ears from a wooly mammoth, and started quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail to all his nerd caveman friends, there have been questions which have ever dwelt in the hallowed halls of geekdom.  Is Mr. Spock Jewish?  Why can’t an Orc Shaman train in duel wielding?  What exactly is in Hobbit Weed anyways?  But greatest of all these timeless unanswerables is that most quanderous quandary of all:  Who is better, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard?  Now certainly greater minds than I have grappled with this mystery; Saint Augustine, for instance, was a staunch supporter of the CaptainKirkSchool, while rival East Coast Theologian John Calvin was a diehard member of the Picard Faction.  Who then are we to believe, when such giants as these stand so irrevocably divided?  Well, me.  Why?  Because I’m gonna take this whole thing apart logically and after weighing all the options carefully just go with which one gives me a shoutout on his Myspace page.  Well, then, without further ado, buckle on your ridgiest forehead and let’s get started; and age before beauty being the standard rule for these things, we’re a gonna start with Captain Kirk.

            Beginning with points in his favor, Captain Kirk, much like Bill Clinton, boldly got it on with all sorts of alien life forms, often without even checking whether or not they were, technically speaking, female.  Picard, on the other hand, mostly just stuck to having a major 5^th grade crush on Dr. Beverly Crusher, who, while she was kind of hot in a space mom sort of a way, was also Wesley’s mother, for which she, and by association, Captain Picard, loses all potential coolness points in terms of romance.

            In terms of punching things in the face, Captain Kirk is also the clear winner, for while every once in a while Picard would go out and manfully beat the space crap out of someone, I always felt like an episode hadn’t really gotten started right if Kirk hadn’t beaten something up by halfway through the opening credits.  So yeah, when Picard punched someone in the face with a saddle or shot them with a crossbow, you knew that he was doing it because he really cared, but the fact is, in terms of sheer ass-beatitude, Kirk wins by a mile.

            Concerning the manner of Klingons they hung out with, Kirk is the decisive winner as well.  I know, I know, Worf is pretty cool, especially because he holds the intergalactic record for telling the most people that they will die without honor before breakfast on a single day (1,387), but think about Kirk’s Klingons for a second.  They had shiny pants.  Shiny, shiny, shiny pants.  Seriously, I’m all psyched about the 23^rd century just because of the anticipated breakthroughs in pants technology.  Also, since Kirk was instrumental in helping Spock to establish the now axiomatic Evil Twin Goatee Rule, he gets bonus points in this one.

            Also, when it comes to l337 I.T. skillz, Kirk pretty much has it in the bag, for his awesome ability to make evil space computers blow up.  Granted, for him this was pretty much a weekly challenge, so he got aplenty of practice, but if I recall rightly, some of these evil space computers had been enslaving entire planets for centuries, and all Kirk had to do to make smoke come out of their ears was throw out a poser like this, “You claim to be programmed to help these people, but in fact you totally suck.”  Or, “Everything I tell you is a lie; I’m lying to you right now.”  True, every computer that Kirk ever met talked like Stephen Hawking on ‘shrooms, but still, being able to destroy evil computers just by saying stuff that doesn’t make any sense, that’s pretty sweet.

            On the subject of gracefully dealing with hair loss, Picard is far and away the better of the two.  I mean, think about how many fraudulent/fake-looking baldness cures we already have in the 21^st century; by the time Picard starts getting a little thin on top there’s probably millions of different useless ways for middle-aged honky captains to feel like they’re doing something about male pattern baldness.  So Picard gets all sorts of cool points for just not giving a damn.  Kirk on the other hand, appears to have been wearing a cheap space toupee made from a dead tribble since at least 1967, and while his continued power over the ladies of the Alpha Quadrant in spite of this handicap is impressive, he still has a mop on his head.

            In terms of who they are in real life, I’m afraid that Picard wins pretty much completely.  I mean, sure Kirk was flying on a plane once back in the 60s (tickets purchased on Priceline, no doubt), and there was a Big Freaky Eskimo Sasquatch Leper  on the wing (or, for those of you preferring the politically correct term, a Big Freaky Inuit Sasquatch Leper) and he had the guts to break a window and shoot at it, which would, under normal circumstances, mean a point in his favor, but just think about what he’s up against here.  I mean, Captain Picard is also the leader of the X-Men.  That means that not only does he get to fight Q and hang out with the guy who does Reading Rainbow, but he’s also the world’s most powerful psychic (more powerful even than Dion Warwick), he hangs out with Wolverine, and his nemesis is Gandalf the Gray.  C’mon now, you just can’t beat credentials like that.

            Finally we get to accents and nationalities, where Picard wins pretty much hands down.  Sure, he’s supposed to be French, but what evidence is there that he lives like it?  He’s always drinking tea, he has a totally British accent, he occasionally beats people up, and he doesn’t wear a beret.  I think there’s only one conclusion we can draw here: that by the 24^th century, mankind has discovered a cure for being French.  Kirk on the other hand, is from Canada, or possibly Iowa.  It doesn’t matter though, because his accent is the most completely weird thing ever in the history of the human race.  Really, it’s like when he was three years old he just memorized all the magnetic poetry pieces on his mom’s refrigerator, and for the rest of his life, whenever people look at him like he’s supposed to say something, he just starts stringing them together randomly with all these dramatically useless Keanu pauses thrown in.

            So yeah, in the end, for finding a cure for Frenchitude, and for being able to hold a serious conversation with a Ferengi without giggling himself silly, Picard wins.  Sorry Kirk, you’re just too weird.

            Please direct all Shatner-inspired hate mail to this address: ben@teacupmammoths.com

            I love eating at Panera’s, as I have made abundantly clear in this very space previously, in no small part because of all the potential wackiness that can happen when they have to call your name.  I went there with my dad the other week though, and the first thing that the girl at the counter said was, “Whoa! You guys look exactly alike!”  Which is kinda true, cause we do, but then I got to thinking, maybe it’s not that I look a lot like my dad after all, maybe she’s just crazy and that’s what Panera Girl says to everyone.  If that’s true, I would imagine she gets punched a lot.  I mean, being told I look just like my dad is one thing, but what if I had chosen instead to share an over-roasted beef hamwich with say, an orangutan, or President Gerald Ford?  Then I might not have taken it so well.  Also, it would be completely hilarious if when you ordered your sandwich there, you said your name was Spartacus, then, when they called you, a bunch of other guys who had also used the same name came up and they were like, “Which of you is Spartacus?”  And then everyone would be all like, “I am Spartacus!” “No, I am Spartacus!”  “Nay, pity ye these fools, for I am Spartacus!”  You’d probably never get your sandwich, but it would be fun.

            I was in Harrisonburg last week, and since I went to JMU (‘Jo Momma University) it was all nostalgic and stuff, except since I was there, they’ve changed all this stuff, and the town is all different.  Like, they used to just have a regular dentist office in town, but now they’ve built a new bigger one.  The thing is, on the sign there’s this big picture of a Swirling Vortex of Doom witch doctor hand with a big eye in the middle.  Now, if this was a sign for the hand, eye, and Swirling Vortex of Doom specialist, that would all be cool, but unless he’s a voodoo dentist or something, I suspect that the sign-making guy just gave him one he had lying around the shop.  Also, now there’s an entire Heavenly Ham emporium in the mall.  Back when I was a student there, all we had was a Ham of the Damned store, but now it’s gone too, victim to the merciless progression of Harrisonburg trying to get all classy.

            Why is it that people in public restroom always have to go and write dirty limericks and stuff on the walls?  I mean, if you’ve already decided to carry a magic marker with you at all times, I’m clearly not going to talk you out of using it, but why not try to change it up a little bit and be different.  Like instead of writing a clever haiku implying that whoever reads it is gay, try putting up an Emily Dickenson poem.  Or instead of just recording that you were there, why not throw out a few lines from Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Great Expectations?  Trust me, you’ll weird out so many more people that way.

            You know how they’re always putting out those little books of funny and/or dumb things that the President said?  I’ll bet those are a relatively new phenomenon.  Like, imagine being in medieval Mongolia and hanging out the Barnes & Noble yurt, you’d have to have a book of like, humorous Genghis Khanisms, and there’d be a big picture of him on the front holding a chicken of falling out of a helicopter or something, and it’d be full of verbal slip-ups, where he had been doing an on air spelling bee or something with his horde, and had accidentally spelt yak with an extra E at the end.  That would have been funny.

            Last night I was in Waffle House enjoying a delicious nocturnal foodstuff, and there was this guy there whistling a merry little tune.  But after a minute, I realized that it was in fact the theme song from Wrath of Khan.  And so I was all freakin out, cause he was this trucker hanging out at Waffle House, whistling the Wrath of Khan song.  I wanted to say something, but I knew that if I was wrong, I would surely bring shame upon my family for ten generations, so I didn’t say anything.  I was gonna do some really subtle thing that would let any other Khanheads around know I picked up on it, like go trap myself in an asteroid and kill Leonard Nimoy, but by the time I’d figured out my plan of action, he’d already left.  I suspect that someone’s just come out with like, a Wrath of Khan remix, like Willy Nelson or someone, so now all the truckers know it; which, when you think about it, is actually far more weird than just the idea that a lone trucker might just happen to be a fan.

            If you’re one of those people who goes to the International House of Pancakes just because it’s all cosmopolitan and international, I’m afraid I’m about to disappoint you horribly.  You see, it turns out that there’s really just like, one up in Canada and that’s it.  So don’t be sitting there thinking that people in Papua New Guinea are, at that exact same moment, eating an international pancake too, unless you “eating an international pancake,” you mean, “sitting in the jungle eating tigers,”  which you probably didn’t mean unless you’re crazy.

            The Internet, it goes almost without saying, is pretty darn awesome, embodying, as it does, the very quintessence of all things cool.  Where else, after all, can order a ham from the comfort of their own home or office?  Through what other medium can one watch footage of a beached whale being thrown miles into the air via the ingenuity of our nation’s highway department?  Where else can you go, should you desire to know who would win in a hypothetical battle between Casper Weinberger and Alf?  Indeed, it should come then as no surprise that the Internet was invented right here in America, Land of New Stuff We Made Up.  Though originally envisioned by Alexander Graham Bell, (who actually invented the telephone primarily so that his other invention, the 56k modem would have something to run off of) the 19^th century Internet really turned out to be mostly just good for buying wagon tongues online and posting Chester A. Arthur/X-Men crossover fanfics.  And so the Internet, widely ridiculed as a failure, lay fallow until Al Gore (who originally became stranded on Earth after his soybean-powered time machine conked out over Tennessee) decided to use his awesome powers to make mankind’s most ancient dream of being able to look for naked pictures of Brittany Spears while working at the office come true at last.  In short, the Internet rules.

            Alack, not all is well in Internetland, for now, the most ancient and bitter enemy of all that is good in the world, the United Nations, has decided to try and take over all of cyberspace and use it for their own nefarious ends.  You see, back when he finally perfected the Internet, Al Gore knew that he would not always be there to oversee his creation and that he would have to make special provision that it always be looked after.  So he built a robot to do it, but the robot went haywire, escaped, and proceeded to run for President a few years back.  In desperation, Al Gore gathered up all the monkeys he could find, and herded them into a vast, secret underground bunker far beneath WashingtonD.C.  There they toil ceaselessly, each with his own little monkey powerbook, doling out domain names, flinging poop at one another, and making sure that the people of the world can always Mapquest their way to the nearest Wally World and endless vaults of completely worthless information such as the fact that pumpernickel is German for “fart of Satan.”  Now, secreted away deep within their Fortress of Doom, the U.N. has decided that they want to run the show.

            Now, at first glance, this might seem like a decent enough idea.  After all, one tends to think of the U.N. as kind of being like Captain Planet and the Planeteers, or the Superfriends back in the 70s when they were diverse, yet completely ineffective.  However, the truth becomes all too horribly clear when you think for a moment about the fact that most of the people at the U.N. actually come from other countries.  I mean, when you think about all the most evil men from throughout history, the vast majority of them were, in fact, from other countries too, the same countries that now want to be in charge of the Internet.  To whom exactly am I referring?  Let’s take a closer look at just some of the people and nations who would now have a say in whether or not you’re allowed to set up a website with nothing but pictures of squirrels being sucked through various kitchen appliances:

            Napoleon Bonaparte, whose necromantically animated army of skeleton warriors and Frenchmen swept across continental Europe and kind of Russia, shutting down Internet cafes across much of the civilized world as well as making a necklace out of the iPods of his slain enemies.  Also generally credited with inventing the pop-up ad, Napoleon was from France, a nation which just so happens to be part of the U.N.

            Rasputin, the mad Russian monk, who, in the early 20^th century gained great influence over the court and local area networks of Czar Nicolas through the clever use of those little ads where they say that if you punch the monkey or set Gary Coleman on fire you can win a Playstation 3 (yes, he knew that someday there was going to be a Playstaion 3; that’s just how awesome his dark powers were).  Russia, where Rasputin was from also happens (all too conveniently) to be a part of the U.N.

            Adolf Hitler, who in addition to being a total psycho, is thought by many to have invented adware and, on at least one occasion, hacked President Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt’s Livejournal.  And you know how there’s nothing in Wyoming anymore?  It used to be an earthly paradise, but Hitler turned his giant orbital boringness ray on it and things there haven’t been the same since.  Hitler of course, was from Germany, which, last time I checked, even had it’s own monogrammed parking spot at the U.N.

            Zimbabwe, which really isn’t that evil or anything, but seriously, do they even have the Internet there?  I mean, what if they think it’s some kind of water buffalo or something and pass all these completely inappropriate laws based on such a faulty assumption (Article 7, Subparagraph 18: No Internets shall be allowed to graze in the town square during the festival of the Fall harvest.  Also, when marrying the daughter of a village elder, a young man must present to him a gift of three ISPs and a bushel of gigabytes.).

            What then is to be done?  Well, while most of the battle must be left to our nation’s leaders (Chewbacca, Dick Cheney, and Sarah Michelle Gellar), we can each to our part by traveling to other countries and loudly complaining about what a pain it is to have to look after an Internet all the time.  Or, if you’re not the traveling sort, send letters to foreign countries like Honduras and Vermont, bemoaning how the Internet is always sneaking into your house at night and eating all your goats.  Also, plant a VictoryGarden, because that always works.  There you have it, all we can do now is hope that our leaders do not fail us, and that should the U.N. get their international panties in a bunch about this, we can always just put the Internet in an old shoe box with some holes poked in the lid and stuff it under America’s bed, then just whistle the official No Really I’m Not Doing Anything Suspicious tune and deny that there ever was an Internet in the first place and tell them to send in U.N. inspectors if they don’t believe us.

            Well, here we are again, just three years away from the next Presidential election, and already people are wondering who’s going to get nominated and who, in the fullness of time after Florida’s quadrennial Wacky Voting Misadventure, is going to be running the country for the next four to eight years.  Some of course speculate that Dick Cheney is going to make a go of it, but I happen to have it on good authority that he’s been meaning to spend some quality time at his secret volcano fortress under the sea singing, dancing, capering about, and raising an army of robo-baboons.  Others suspect that John Kerry might try to win it again, but since recent biological studies have found that he is, in fact, an Ent, this seems unlikely as well.  Who then shall lead our great country?  Clearly we need someone possessing great leadership skills, moral clarity, and an uncommon degree of badassitude.  Taking all these things into account, I think there’s really only one possible answer, Mr. T, for any number of reasons which I’m going to expound upon at greater length right now.

            First, he’s compassionate, because he pities the fool.  Now if there’s one thing our country has plenty of these days, its fools, and President Mr. T could mobilize the government as never before to pity all of them more effectively.

            Next, he knows the importance of conserving important nonrenewable fossil fuels and taking less petroleum-intensive forms of transportation, which is of course why he ain’t getting on no plane.  Of course, this might lead some to wonder about what we’re going to do with Air Force One for the next four years, but between renting it out for Harrison Ford movies and bar mitzvahs, I think we should be able to make a pretty tidy profit on it.

            Also, Mr. T cares about kids.  Whether it be drinking milk for good nutrition, staying in school, or growing a Mohawk, Mr. T is the very epitome of all sorts of good qualities that parents all across this great land of ours want to see their kids take to heart, thusly enabling them to make good life choices and beat up Sylvester Stallone.  Yes parents all over can rest assured that their kids would have strong bones, good study skills, and funky hair styles if Mr. T were running things.

            Some people, it has recently been the case, have criticized the President for acting unilaterally.  Not Mr. T though, cause he totally knows how to work with a team.  Like, say his cabinet and Hans Blix were captured by terrorists.  Hans Blix would say something whiny in a foreign language or something, and then Mr. T would just completely ignore his euro-ramblings and build an assault vehicle out of a lawnmower, a roast beef sandwich, and a sack of doorknobs (with the help of Reginald Barclay, the most nervousest starship engineer in the Alpha Quadrant, of course), thereby whomping the terrorists and proving that when your teamwork is good enough, you don’t even have to listen to other people.

            And speaking of terrorists, President Mr. T would be sure to wage a culturally sensitive, yet mercilessly badass war against all those who would blow up our junk.  Just imagine, Osama bin Laden going one on one with Mr. T.  From the second the bell rang until about two seconds later when Mr. T turned him into chunky salsa, it would be like one big metaphor of awesomeness over evil.

            And lest you be concerned that Mr. T might somehow lack the fundamental understanding of economics so necessary to keeping our nation on an even keel, I ask you to look no further than his obvious and blatant support for returning to the gold standard.  Not only would this ensure a low inflation rate for years to come, but it would also certainly make him the most blinged out President since Jimmy “Funkmaster Shizzlemah” Carter.

            And finally, just bear in mind that Mr.T would be the first President since Rutherford B. Hayes to be available in Chia form, for those patriotic yet weird Americans who want a shaggy green little terra cotta idol of their Commander-in-Chief watching over their kitchen sink, just as America watches over the kitchen sink of the world.

            There are some things in this world that people are just better for not having too much of.  You know, like things that tend to corrupt us, or create terrible monsters or terrible reality shows.  Indeed, one can almost imagine the gods themselves sitting down at the dawn of time and making a list of it all, “Hmmm, nuclear weapons, afro picks, molybdenum, pickle relish, plutonium, beef, heroin, we’d better keep a close rein on all that stuff.  Right then, on to inventing weasels and whisky sours!”  Sadly, there are a few things that somehow either were overlooked, or were invented by minds more ingeniously twisted than the Ancients could ever have imagined, and every now and then some hideous new evil breaks forth by becoming too readily available for public consumption.  One such evil, of course, is garden gnomes.

            Now before I even begin, I know that many of you must be out there shaking your heads dismissively whilst thinking to yourselves, “Surely, mass garden gnome consumption shall forever be a vice of only the very wealthy, being expensive as they so often are!”  Would that you were right, but alas, I fear modern technology has once more unleashed upon an unwary world an evil the likes of which has not been seen since that great pog debacle a while back (The Great Pog Debacle, by the way, would be a most excellent name for a band).  For you see, just last week, whilst I was out shopping for crossbow parts, I saw garden gnomes on sale for three for $10 at the hardware store (don’t even bother asking which one, I’m certainly not going to tell you and then be held responsible for imperiling your immortal soul with ageless and unspeakable evils).  Think about it, that’s like, $3 a gnome, so even if you’re just earning minimum wage, you could still be bringing in upwards of 80 gnomes a week.  And when you start getting into your higher income brackets, it only gets more frightening.  What’s that you say?  You don’t see how buying thousands of gnomes could ruin your life and/or bring about the very Apocalypse itself?  Well then, join me, won’t you, as we embark on a magical little tour of just a few of the veritable plethora of evils that gnomes can visit upon the human race.

            First, you could buy like, a thousand of them, and then use a combination of black magic and common household cleaners to turn them into a legion of the damned.  You’d start out by sacrificing them all to one of your basic hell-beasts, like Azaroth the Defiler, of Zothriel the Butt-Ugly, or even the rarely attempted Timmy, the Unimpressively Named.  Then, once they’re all dead, you turn right around and strike some sort of demonic pact, to bring them all back in some hideous semblance of life to cater to your every evil whim, like some kind of horrible army of zombie death gnomes or something (also, The Zombie Death Gnomes would be just about the best gnome-related band name ever).

            Alternately, you could get a few hundred of them and then raise them on nothing but raw hamburger, thereby instilling in them an insatiable thirst for blood.  Then, all you’d have to do is sell them back to little old ladies and wait for the inevitable as the ravening gnomes slaughtered untold legions of the elderly.  And don’t go thinking that after you figured out what was going on you could just rehabilitate the gnomes to be peaceable again.  Nope, once a gnome’s tasted human blood, there’s nothing you can do but set him on fire and whack him with an aluminum baseball bat that’s been blessed by the pope, and should you happen to get one of those store-brand knock-off sanctified baseball bats, it won’t work right, and you’ll just end up with a whole bunch of bloodthirsty and also on fire killer gnomes running around the house clawing at the furniture and opening up little gateways to the underworld, which is kinda cute for the first ten minutes, but then you want to take a nap or fix a waffle and it just gets annoying.

            Of course, while a single gnome can be cute; many people make the mistake of buying one from an old Asian man and then ignoring his sage advice and feeding it after midnight or getting it wet.  The next thing you know, you’ve an entire herd of green, scaly, foul-tempered additional gnomes running around, tearing things up, making sequels and whatnot, until you can destroy them all with sunlight or preferably high explosives.  Don’t try to win them over with love, that only works in Care Bear movies and the U.N, unless by “win them over” you mean “kill them”, and by “with love” you mean “with one of those proton packs from Ghostbusters.”  Also, if you absolutely must have a gnome (because like, you’re handicapped and need to use one as a back scratcher or bottle opener) make sure you take it to the gnome vet to be neutered, because most of the stray gnomes out there just end up in the pot at various Chinese restaurants anyway.

            So there you have it, a brief run down of just a few of the horrors of which a man armed with thousands of gnomes it capable (and that’s not even getting into the ecological terrors they can create, as seen in World of Warcraft).  So, for the good of humanity, I would hope that each and every one of you out there would take some time this week to go buy and few gnomes, and then throw them off the nearest cliff into the sea, thereby destroying them, and ridding the world of their evil.  One can only hope, of course, that any that survive would quickly perish in the depths of the sea, rather than mutating and falling under the sway of Aquaman, who would probably just manage to taint the very oceans with their pointy-hatted eviliciousness.

            I think that the moment when I first began to suspect that I was in for an unusual trip came when I passed the ficus plant trying to hitch a ride along 288.  Really.  And there upon lies the story.  It was the evening of this Saturday last, I had just gotten off work after yet another fun- and chicken-filled day at Henricus, and was off on my merry way to jolly old Madison Virginia, home of absolutely nothing, but temporary location of numerous of my old college homies. 

            I’m not entirely sure whether the aforementioned ficus plant standing by the side of 288 with a suitcase was in fact the cause of the weirdness which was to ensue, or whether it was merely a harbinger of it.  All I know is that there was so totally no way on Earth I was gonna stop and pick it up, despite the fact that I had packed my usual supply of armaments that I take with me when I go on a road trip.  Crossbow, chainmaille, Potato Gun of Doom™, fun-size travel claymore, all these essential pieces of road tripping equipment were safely stowed away in the hold of my Minivan of Fury, yet still, I felt vaguely unsafe, and unwilling to trust in the angelic nature of ficus plants.

            After getting out of town though, things seemed to settle back into some semblance of normality for a while.  Until I got to Lousia.  There, it turned out to be the case that I needed to buy gas, potatoes, and Cheez-its.  With this in mind, I stopped by the local Food Lion, and stepped into a weird universe of terror that had nothing to do with their poor selection of firing yams.  What happened?  Read on, and be amazed:

            You see, as I walked into Food Lion, some guy almost ran into me.  Not like he wasn’t paying attention or something either, he was looking right ahead, where I happened to be standing in all my Benly awesomeness, but for whatever reason, he durn near bowled me over.  I moved on however, and thought no more of the situation, for about ten seconds.  What I encountered in the Food Lion at first struck me as odd, then unsettling, then completely freakish, then right back to just odd again. For you see, it was like absolutely nobody there could see me.  Seriously, like people kept almost running into me with their carts, forcing me to jump out of the way like I was in the weird Special Grocery Store edition of Frogger.  Those few who couldn’t quite ignore me completely acknowledged me with only a look of passing disgust and revulsion before going off along their ways, and leaving me very weirded out and thoroughly relieved to be out of that accursed Food Lion of Louisa.  So what exactly happened?  Here’s a few theories I’ve come up with after literally minutes of paranormal, quantum electrodynamic research:

            First, I think it highly possible that the ficus plant was actually generating some kind of weird subspace distortion field, that slightly phased me out of sync with our dimension, like that Reading Rainbow episode where LeVar Burton got hit by the warp reactor and he had to wander around with ship until Worf emitted some kind of radiation that brought him back into phase.  That’s why nobody saw me in the Food Lion, I was all ghostly and phantasmal, which would have been kind of cool if I’d known what was going on and tried to use my stealth powers for something awesome, like hurling a watermelon and Osama bin Laden, assuming he shops at the Louisa Food Lion.  I don’t even want to think about why a ficus plant would do all this in the first place, it was probably just mad because I wouldn’t give it a lift to wherever it is that ficus plants want to go to (probably hell, or worse, New Jersey).

            Or maybe, I wasn’t the one who was out of sync with reality.  Perhaps the entire town of Lousia was trapped in a recursion loop within the very space-time continuum itself.  And like, for the past 300 years, they all just keep repeating all the same stuff, unable to break free.  And like, since I was new and different, I was all crimping their trapped-in-a-neverending-purgatory-of-Food-Lion style, so they were miffed.  Or maybe it was because I took their last box of Garlic-flavored Cheez-its.  Either way, someone was messing with the fabric of reality, which is never cool, unless you’re doing it so you can ride around on a Quetzalcoatl or buy some Ecto Cooler or vote for William Howard Taft.

            In truth though, I think that what was actually happening was this:  You see, a bajillion years ago, when Lousia was build by the Ancients, it was an earthly paradise, a perfect society, where everything was totally sweet and it rained waffles and everybody had their own helper monkey whether they needed one or not.  It was all ruled by the High Archon Billy, Potentate of All Louisa.  But lo, Billy knew that he would not live forever, and so he built a totally awesome robot version of himself to rule the city after he died, or returned to his home planet of Thanagar, or went back to college or whatever.  And everything was cool for a bout two weeks, and then somebody spilled a Diet Coke on this robot, and it went all crazy and decided that the only way to enslave all the good people of Louisa, and make them into some kind of werewolf zombies, or zombie werewolves, and even though they all recognized me as an outsider, they couldn’t really do anything aside from stymie my efforts to buy snack crackers and leer at me.  Also, zombie werewolf zombies are weak against crossbows and potatoes.

            Anyway, eventually I made it out to Madison, which is so far out in the middle of nowhere that a nearby highway sign points the way to Richmond and also to Syria, which shouldn’t even be on the same continent, but that’s probably still just the ficus plant distorting reality.

            It seems like these days you can’t just find a barber shop to go get a haircut at.  Nowadays they’re all called beauty shops, and they’re way the hell expensive.  I mean, if I was planning on being on the cover of Vogue, or Popular Mechanics, then maybe I’d need to be beautiful, but as it is, all I’m really looking for in a coiffure is something that won’t make me look like an unfrozen caveman historical interpreter.  That’s why someone needs to start Less Ugly shop, where you pay half as much and all they do is try and make you look presentable enough to go out in public.

            If I was in the Klan, I’d giggle like a Japanese schoolgirl every time I stopped at Sheetz.

            You know how in 1984 (the novel, not the actual year) the Ministry of Beating the Crap Out of You would stalk people and learn everything about them so that when they were interrogating you, they’d already know like, the one thing in all the world that would terrify you the most?  If I lived in that world, I’d always be acting afraid of ridiculous stuff, and acting like all the stuff that really freaked me out wasn’t a problem.  That way, when they finally arrested me for running a subversive blog of liberty, they’d have gotten all of their What Terrifies Ben information wrong, so instead of setting me on fire while playing Marky Mark records or something, they’d hang me by my toes over a giant vat of sour cream with ennui-ridden gerbils paddling around in it in tiny little canoes whilst humming the theme from the Muppet Show backwards. Then the government would probably collapse, and that would pretty sweet.

            At the Wawa nearest to my house, there’s this one paper towel dispenser in the bathroom that’s like, seven feet off the ground.  And it’s not like it’s right over the sink or something and the mirror’s in the way, it’s just way up there on the wall.  As I see it, there are two possible reasons to put it up there:  either it was put up there for use by a basketball team (which Richmond doesn’t really have), or Bigfoot has finally gotten a job installing bathroom fixtures and is inconsiderately putting them at heights suitable only for himself.

            The other day I stopped a McDonalds to get a cheeseburger, and when I was on my way back out to my van, I noticed that there was some chewing gum stuck to my tire.  But before my brain could formulate a rational thoughts like, “Oh look, chewing gum.  I like ham,” it just randomly came out of nowhere with, “Oh crap, there’s gum on my tire!  I bet that’s gonna completely mess up my gas mileage unless I get it off of there!”  I knew before I had even finished thinking it, that that was the dumbest thing that ever I had thunk, but it was too late, my brain was mostly on other stuff at the time, and I only had enough system resources free to be silently abashed.

            If I was a paranoid schizophrenic, and preferred to spend my days having intense and rancorous arguments with all the invisible trolls hovering around me, the first thing I’d do is go out and get one of those hands-free cell phone headsets and wear it all the time; then people on the street would just think I was a business executive with poor fashion sense.

            If you ever become a totally lame, bush-league supervillain, know your limits.  Like, if you’re a ferret wrangler, and one day a radioactive ferret bites you and you get ferret powers, don’t decide to become evil and then go out and pick a fight with Superman or something.  Seriously, rob a few banks, give Aquaman a wedgie, whatever, but don’t think that just because you’ve got ferretvision that you’re gonna take down a guy who can eat lava, cause it’s not gonna happen.  Unless you were bitten by a kryptonite ferret, then you might have a chance (Kryptonite Ferret, by the way, would be an awesome for a band).

            Family Circus always confuses me, because like, one of the kids in it will say something in a little word balloon, and then the other will answer it in the caption underneath.  Like Jeffy will be saying something like, “Grandma says that the metric system is for Commies!”  And then down underneath, Billy replies, “Not now, you fool, the hour of Festival is nigh upon us!”  Which is cool and all, but I grew up on the Far Side, (not literally, like my neighbors were talking cows or something), so to me, it seems like the caption ought to be a witty or insightful observation on the situation described by the above speech bubble.  So for me Family Circus would be so much better if say, Dolly was saying, “PJ, I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way of pain!”  And then at the bottom it would say something like, “Unfortunately for Dolly, PJ was merely a toddler with ahead shaped like a football and an inconvenient affinity for orcs.”

            As most of you who’ve been keeping up with teacupmammoths for a while now probably know, Mark Trail is the most thoroughly awesome nature-oriented superhero ever.  Seriously, he’s not like all those hyper eco-sensitive ones like Captain Planet, Jimmy Carter, and Aqua-Man, he still goes fishing and throws petrified trees at airplanes now and then.  Anyways, it happens to be the case that while he spends most of his weeks involved in incredibly long and ridiculous storylines.  The present one (which involves what has to be the least well-planned murder ever to be attempted in the funny pages by a woman with a double racing stripe in her hair) will most certainly be the topic of a rambling, long, and completely silly blog by myself after it finally finished up sometime near the end of 2007.

            But that’s all beside the point, which is this: that every Sunday, Mark, in reverence for the Sabbath day, holds of beating up people with sideburns for a day and instead goes all full color to explain stuff about nature to us.  Now, usually (by which I mean every single time ever in the course of human history up to this point) Mark just walks through the forest, surrounded by gigantic monster wildlife while explaining some important facts about whatever animal he seems to have found this week.  Generally, it includes a lot of lines like this, “Hamsters, though widely prized for their ability to survive in the harsh vacuum of space, are also a natural source of riboflavin and can be used to ward off the minions of Satan.”  This past Sunday however, Mark Trail seems to have gone completely off-topic, because instead of telling us about how orcas were first built by the ancient Mesopotamians, or how toothpaste was originally inspired by baboons, Mark Trail just goes off on this completely random tangent about caffeine.  And it’s not like it ties into the whole “surrounded by animals” thing at all.  It’s just caffeine.  Take a look:

My guess is that Mark was just really tired and hung over that day, and so while he was supposed to be talking about how throwing axes at rabbits is a fine thing to do with the kids, or how a homemade forest meth lab can often attract enormous hell squirrels, he was just too strung out and tired to do it and kept rambling on about caffeine.  Really, it just makes so little sense that it confuses me just looking at it.  Why on Earth is Mark Trail wandering around in nature like this, yet talking about caffeine, which, as I recall from Crap You Can’t Make Out of Trees and Weasels 101, is found nowhere in nature (except for Starbucks).

So then, we have to wonder, has Mark merely gone flippin’ loony, or is there something else going on here, something so sinister that even Mark Trail can’t just come out and warn us about how important it is.  Let’s take a closer look then, at the last panel, the one where Mark is brewing himself a iced double viente mocha latte in front of his tent.  And, of course – Great googly moogly!  It’s a bear!  It’s being attracted by the sweet, sweet aroma of the coffee!  Yes, that must be it; look, even Mark Trail himself is running away (or possibly flying away on a wisp of smoke, the picture doesn’t really make it that clear), so well does he know the ferocity of a bear separated from his coffee!

What’s that you say?  You doubt that bears so completely lust after coffee?  Well then, let’s just take a minute and review the facts Mr. Bears-Don’t-Like-Coffeerson.  First, let’s recall the tragic tale of Davy Crockett, who, as the song goes, was killed in a bar when he was only three.  A coffee bar.  Who could possibly kill a person in a coffee bar?  The only kind of folks that go to those are emo kids, Davy Crockett, me when I’m getting dumped by some girl, and bears.  Now, emo kids rarely went and lived in the wild frontier, owing to the paucity of angst out yonder in the early days, and all the coffee bars I’ve ever been dumped in were here in Virginia, which really is neither wild, nor a frontier, nor has it been either since about 1644.  Which once again, leaves us with bears.  Yes, clearly, a bear came into the coffee bar and mauled young Davy Crockett, and now, all these years later, another, or possibly the same immortal death bear, is on the loose once more.

Now normally, Mark Trail would be the first to warn us of this, but I’ll bet he’s been taken hostage by the bear, who wanted Mark to use his awesome powers of persuasion to do a strip about caffeine and how delicious it is.  That way, after everyone read the strip and made a bunch of coffee, the bear could just wander around, mauling innocent people and getting all high off caffeine.  But no bear is smarter than Mark Trail (except for Yogi Bear, perhaps, or that one Care Bear who went rogue a few years back), and so, though the bear was sitting right there off screen, probably holding a flaming 2x4 wrapped in barbed wire, Mark Trail cleverly snuck in a warning to all of us out in comics land who love coffee and hate bears, as all true red-blooded Americans should (the Russians, of course, are just the opposite; they start every day with a freshly brewed cup of bears, and never go out into the woods alone lest they be eaten by a ravenous cup of Taster’s Choice).  Now, there’s probably a good lesson in here somewhere, or at least a funny ad idea (We’ve replaced Mark’s Folger’s flavor crystals with a bear, let’s watch and see if he notices the difference. “Mmm, this tastes better than usuaaaaaaaagh!”), but instead I’m just going to end with a warning: Watch the skies - For bears.

And lastly, lest you start thinking that Mark Trail is too wholesome to be interesting, I leave you with this, the most disturbingly weird Mark Trail strip I could find anywhere on the internet:

            Throughout all the ages of human history and civilization, there have been many numerous standards and definitions of hotness.  But ever since the dawn of time, during all the ages of the Earth, there has been one woman perennially thought by all to be the very epitome of babetude.  That woman, of course, is Wonder Woman, the one human being on the planet who can fly around in a pair of star-spangled panties and still command respect from evildoers (Bill Clinton tried it too for a while, but it just wasn’t the same).  Yes, possessed of the awesome superhuman powers of being able to throw a tiara in a straight line (Have you ever tried doing that?  Whenever I do, mine just kinds of zings off in a random direction, hitting Lex Luther purely by chance, if at all), and never having to fix her hair, Wonder Woman tirelessly works to raise the glass ceiling in the superhero business.  But of course, no hero is complete without a little bit of mystery, and Wonder Woman is no different in that regard from any other.  Come with me then, as we explore one of the great questions of our age.

            Why does Wonder Woman’s Battle Brassiere have a big WW on it?  I mean, while she was on the island of the Amazons, her name was Diana, and the armor is way older than she is anyway.  Nobody started calling her Wonder Woman until she got into the superheroining business (originally they tried calling her “Flying Around Punching Stuff Girl” but that didn’t look nearly as good on a lunchbox).  So unless like, every woman before her who wore that armor had the ancestral sorority nickname of Wonder Woman, it just doesn’t make sense that there’d be these concentric Ws on her Corset of Invulnerability.  Which leaves us with the question, “Where’d the WW come from?”  Really, if we’re going to be scientific about this, the best thing to do is to simply start with a list of all the people who have the initials WW and then narrow it down from there.

            Okay, it turns out that there’s no website that can help me to do that thing I just proposed to do, so I’m gonna just have to work from memory, and um, yeah, there aren’t any women ever who have those initials so, by infallible process of elimination, we arrive that the one possible conclusion: Woodrow Wilson.  No, really, who else could it be, Wendell Wilkie?  I think not.  No, Woodrow Wilson is actually a frighteningly likely candidate for being the first to wear Wonder Woman’s outfit.  For instance, since we know that the Amazons are all sorts of ancient and Grecian and all that, whoever came up with the armor must have been incredibly old, and since Woodrow Wilson was born back in the Pleistocene Epoch, it all works out from a timeline point of view.

            Also, didn’t you ever wonder about why Wonder Woman needs an invisible jet?  I mean, she can already fly without one, and since its invisible she’s always forgetting where she parked it anyway, until the Flash runs into it at approximately 3,000 miles and hour and creates some kind of a rift in the space-time continuum or something.  Besides, isn’t being an Amazon princess with a lasso and a Frisbee tiara already mixing your media a little too much anyways?  Why push you luck by bringing a completely random and unnecessary invisible aircraft into the picture?  If you recall though, Woodrow Wilson was one of the few Presidents of the early 20^th century who couldn’t fly under his power, so if he were the first Wonder Woman, he would need a jet.  And since jets hadn’t officially been invented yet (despite the fact that Chester A. Arthur had already discovered jet technology by taking apart a crashed alien spacecraft that he found in his kitchen pantry) making it invisible makes perfect sense after all. 

And didn’t you ever wonder why, despite being from a completely different civilization, Wonder Woman’s suit is still red, white, and blue? I mean sure it’s possible, but then it’s also possible that space aliens would just happen to all speak English and be attracted to William Shatner, but it’s not really all that likely.  If Woodrow Wilson was Wonder Woman once though, it all falls into place since he would surely have used the colors of America.  And what about the lasso anyway?  Those aren’t Greek or Roman or Canadian of whatever ancient civilization the Amazons are supposed to be from.  They’re from America, which is why Woodrow Wilson would have felt perfectly comfortable using one to catch monsters and make bad guys tell the truth.  And what about her bullet-proof bracelets?  The Ancient whoevers didn’t have guns, so why would they bother making something bullet-proof.  Woodrow Wilson however, had grown up during the Civil War, and had seen the horrors of modern military technology during World War I, so he would certainly have seen the necessity of making such a mighty accessory as a pair of bullet-proof bracelets.

The way I see it, Woodrow Wilson did not in fact die in 1924, rather he was seized with remorse for having held up women’s’ suffrage in America for so long, and decided to make it up to the world, as well as to women in general.  So, after consulting with his magic 8 ball, he moved to the ancient Amazon island of Themiscira and changed his name to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.  There he grew his hair out and started wearing a slinky-looking evening toga around, all the while working to promote women’s causes and being the first person in history to use the phrase “Grrl Power”.  Eventually though, he realized that he wouldn’t be around forever, and so commissioned a magically hot looking outfit for his successor to wear as she battled evil and kind of had a crush on Batman.  Unfortunately, while out shopping for shoes one day, Woodrow Wilson was slain by a rogue narwhal, and Princess Diana had to put on the mantle of Wonder Woman without having time to go out and get it re-monogrammed with her own initials.

So there you have it, the truth behind Wonder Woman’s costume, and the true end of one of the 20^th century’s nerdiest Presidents.  And as for the star-spangled panties, you’re really better off not knowing absolutely everything sometimes, so try not to be too curious about that.

            Of all the movie theatres in the Richmond metro area (and yes, I did deliberately decide to spell theatre the pompous fancy-shmancy lah-de-dah way in the interest of increasing my hits on all those high-falutin’ search engines the rich folk are using nowadays), my favorite by far is the Commonwealth 20.  Now some of you may say that the Byrd is far superior if one is looking to catch a midnight showing of Goonies for less than $2, and that argument is a sound one, so far as it goes.  However, the Commonwealth 20 has something far more awesome to offer than even an extremely late and economically priced showing of Sean Astin while before he became a hobbit.  What is that, you ask?  Allow me to answer your question with another question, which is really less of a question than a rambling soliloquy about what is probably the least thought about thing related to movie theatres ever, the computer-generated “Go Buy Some Snacks Dammit!” thing.  You know, like after you’ve already sat through three repeats of Coke-sponsored trivia questions about Barbara Streisand and Snoop Dog, and after the Jeep commercials (which always make me sad, cause I always hope that this time it means they’ve finally gotten around to making Jeep: The Motion Picture, but no, they haven’t) (yet), and after the 72 different trailers for movies that are coming out soon, 57 of which star Keanu Reeves as the chosen one fighting something like zombies, robots, or childhood obesity.  Then, right before the actually movie starts, there’s the snack thing.

            Now, most of these are so sucky and lame that you might be forgiven for thinking that there’s some Federal law requiring it (there’s not though, I checked with the Federal Bureau of Things That Have to Suck, and even though it ought to be right there between vacuum cleaners and Ben Affleck, there’s nothing on the books about the snack dealie).  And of course, every theatre company has their own version of this thing, most of which look like they were done in 1958 by transferring the fevered dreams of a beatnik directly to film.

            Like, at Regal Cinemas, they have that one where you get into this incredibly lame-looking Amtrak of the future from Tron, and it drives through this horrible war zone of snackage, with all the popcorn kernels detonating right as you drive by and stuff before it finally safely arrives right back where it started.  Or at United Artists, where they drive this unspeakably fake looking hovercar through some bizarre, Orwellian urban wasteland, where all these giant monuments have been built to honor chilled beverages and Milk Duds.  At one point, you buzz the gigantic popcorn tower, and all the popcorn falls out of it, probably crushing countless citizens on the street below, thus freeing them from a nightmarish life of perpetual torture and marketing in Snacktopia.  I forget exactly what the one at Carmike is about, but I’m pretty sure I had a dream once where Lee Iacocca punched a Diet Pepsi off of a flaming blimp, so we’ll just pretend that it was poorly animated and assume that’s their snack thing.  So, after all these, a person is hardly filled with hope and optimism that any CGI snack promotion thing could be other than blasphemously opposed to all that is good and decent in the world, but such a person would regret their harsh and hypothetical judgment when they finally went to the Commonwealth 20.  What makes it so awesome?  I’m not sure I can do justice to it here in mere words, but I’m just gonna start at the beginning and go from there as my muse leads me (yes, there is a blog muse, and she just so happens to be Margaret Thatcher).

            Okay, (and mind you here, I’m just going by memory) it all starts in this big stadium, and immediately, you realize that if ever a team of monkeys threw together an awesome piece of CGI animation, this is it.  All these snack foods start coming out of the various locker rooms and training facilities, and processing out onto the field.  They’re all there, M&Ms, Skittles, quality Coke Products, walking, nay, marching out there into the light of a sunny Spring afternoon.  Some of them are even dancing and doing backflips and stuff.  It’s completely awe-inspiring.  Then, right out of nowhere, the jumbo-sized popcorn tubs come out of nowhere, with a mighty thumpage that shakes the very foundations of the Earth itself (I know, this is fast becoming the dorkiest thing I’ve ever written, but it’s already too late to turn back).  Then, you get to see who’s sitting in the stands, and it’s even more snack foods, though they’re mostly all the ones that come in a bag, rather than popcorn and beverages, and they’re all dancing too; well, if you can call anything that a seated bag of mini-Snickers can do “dancing” (but then again, you can’t really call anything I can do “dancing” either, and I’ve actually got legs, so I don’t even have a good excuse or anything).  Finally, the camera pulls back far enoguht hat you can get a good look at the stadium, and it suddenly strikes you that it’s not just a stadium, it’s the Roman Colosseum, and you’re all like, “Zounds!  They’re going to fight to the death!  Oh, the humanity!”  And then the whole thing spins around a lot and becomes the Commonwealth 20 logo. 

I’m sure that it’s all actually an incredibly deep bit of symbolism, or possibly a biting commentary on our modern way of life, but for the life of me, I have no idea why.  What I do know however, is that if you’ve ever wanted to know what drugs are like without actually trying them, watching this thing is the closest you will ever get.  Really, it’s absolutely awesome, especially the part where when I’m there with Matt (to lean more about Matt, check out his bibliography on this very site) and when this thing comes one we both start giggling like schoolgirls as everyone else in the theatre gets totally weirded out.  Seriously though, even if there aren’t any good movies playing, it’s worth the price of admission just to see it.

            If you’re ever building a sentient computer and you don’t want it to go haywire and become evil, then maybe you shouldn’t give it an eerily soothing voice and a big red evil-looking light for an eye, cause yeah, if you do that, you’re just asking for some evil backlash.

            You know how Olympic swimmers always shave all the hair off their bodies?  They say it makes you swim faster, but that’s ridiculous.  Just look at otters, they’re the furriest dang things ever, and they can anybody.  The same goes for baby seals, fur-bearing trout, and Kevin Costner.  Honestly now, if the only things that lived in the ocean were say, Gorbachev and other whales, I could see how a person might believe that being bald would make you a better swimmer, but c’mon now, what about otters?

            If I were ever President and I made a mistake or something (not a big one like “accidentally” bombing France, but just something minor like falling off a Segway or sticking a lobster in my ear), instead of trying to act all dignified like my cat does when she falls off a chair or something, I’d just go “NARF!”  Just imagine, people all over the world seeing you fall down at an airport and narfing about it.  I’m pretty sure that peace in the Middle East would happen pretty much automatically after that, not to mention bombing France.

            I’ll bet that for people in Africa, lions are like cows.  So if for instance, you went to some college out in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Botswana, you’d be used to driving past all these fields full of lions on your way to school.  And in like, the Botswana Maymont petting zoo, there’d be all these lions, and only the city kids would be freaked out/eaten by them.  But say the circus came to town, and there was like, a cow tamer there, and he’d taught it to jump through fiery hoops and maul koalas and stuff, then that’d be totally new and different.

            I was at the hardware store looking at rulers, and I saw that all of them had a warning on them. “Always wear eye protection when using this tool” they all said.  Seriously, if you need to wear goggles to avoid blinding yourself with a ruler, maybe you shouldn’t even be leaving the house and going to hardware stores.  Okay, maybe if you were trying to measure something less that 12 inches long in a hurricane or something, you might want to wear goggles, but that’s the great thing about rulers, pretty much anything that you can measure with them is small enough that you can just pick it up and carry it to a non-hurricane-infested environment, like inside your house, or at the nearest Applebee’s.  So maybe rulers should just have a warning on them that says, “Do not use this tool during a hurricane; do not stab yourself in the eye with this tool.”  Then all the rest of us could stop worrying that rulers were somehow terribly dangerous or something.

            Also while I was at the hardware store, I noticed that there’s a drill bit manufacturing company called Freud.  That’s just silly.

            If you’re a pirate, then you’ve probably got really bad depth perception on account of your having an eye patch.  So if you were out at the mall or something, and you saw a whole bunch of smurfs, you shouldn’t get all excited right away or anything, because it might just be the Blue Man group really far away.

            You know how they make those little calendars where every day is a new puppy, crossword puzzle, or tropical harwood?  That’s great and all for people who want to start each day with something happy, but what about evil and/or really depressed people?  You don’t want them having a puppy calendar, it would just remind them how sad they were, or possibly motivate them to declare a jihad on puppies or something.  That’s why they should make like, the Hitler-a-Day calendar, where every day is Hitler.  Maybe one day, it would be like, a Hitler-related word search, or a humorous picture of Hitler in a foam rubber cowboy hat, or maybe a picture of Hitler hanging out of a tree, and the caption would be something like, “Is it Friday yet?”, or “Hang in there, Adolf!”

            Everyone thinks submarine sandwiches are named after the ocean-going vessel of the same name (minus the sandwich part).  That’s ridiculous though, because submarines only go back to the Civil War (and then I bet they were called something goofy, like bathyspheres, or aquavelocipedes).  Sandwiches, on the other hand, go all the way back to Earl of Sandwich, who wanted foodstuff that was long enough to beat a street urchin with.  He probably spent a lot of time with his friend, the Earl of Submarine, and together they came up with the submarine sandwich.  Then, after some other guy invented a boat that could (and was supposed to) go underwater, someone else was all like, “Hey, that thing looks like a submarine sandwich!”  And the rest was history.

            You know how some people just age really well, so even after they’re seniors, they still always get carded for the senior discount?  Most people find this flattering, but you know who probably doesn’t?  Vandal Savage, the immortal caveman supervillian.  Like, he’ll be at Commonwealth 20, buying a ticket to see Milo & Otis 2: Judgment Day, and the guy at the window will be all like, “That’ll be $8 sir.”  And Vandal Savage will be all like, “Hang on there sonny, I’m over 12, 000 years old and that mean I get in for $5.50!  Why, back in my day, you could buy one of those big stone cars we used to drive around in for that much money!”  And then he’d have to show his license anyway, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, the ticket guy at Commonwealth 20 rarely believes you when you claim to be an immortal caveman supervillian, even if you bring a club along.

            If you died, and went to Heaven, and at freshman orientation Moses was there, and he looked exactly like Charlton Heston, that would be the coolest thing ever.  Also, I’ll bet that once he dies, Charlton Heston and Moses will always be like, dressing the same and getting into all manner of shenanigans, and confusing everybody.  They’ll be like just like the Olsen twins that way, except for the fact that this’ll be in Heaven, and since the Olsen twins are probably Scientologists or something, that means that instead of heaven, they’ll just come back to Earth as identical Walruses, or go to the Planet Vulcan, or whatever happens to Scientologists when they die.

            There are two people in the world who can get away with calling me whore.  One of them is Jennifer Connelly.  The other, (and the topic of tonight’s blog) is Jessica, who would probably smite me if I put off writing this one any longer.  But who doth she be, this Jessica woman?  From whence dost she come?  Whither do she goest?  Why writest I all olde timey like thus?  All the questions, and fewer, shall I answer here tonight.  So sit back, gentle reader, grab a beer or possibly a box of Ecto Cooler, if you happen to have a time machine, and prepare to get your learn on.

            Jessica was born in the lost and improbable forests of Eenrok, where the gelatinous friths gibber at the three moons of Utan, as they sun their scaly and supple hides upon the banks of the ambivalent river Kalderon.  Mind you, it wasn’t like she just showed up in the wilderness one day and was raised by the wild and woolly were-squirrels which frequent those places for unspeakable rites of evil and the occasional game of bridge; she was rather raised in the yurt of her parents, Wulfgar Trollrender and Helga Weaselflinger, who guarded the paths of the mysterious forests of Eenrok, and slew the vile and unfashionable Krelthak beasts which were in those days wont to wander through the woods in search of unwary travelers, unguarded caravans carrying black rubies from the land of Tarnoria, and perhaps the occasional submarine sandwich (which, in the tongue of her people, is called a “hoagie”).  In these wilds was she reared by her parents and taught by Jedi Master Dick Cheney to keep the forests safe for wayfarers, as had her ancestors from way back in the day during the Nixon Administration.  And so might she ever lived, had not fate (which is not without a sense of humor) intervened.

            Indeed, it so happened that one night, whilst she was at Wal-Mart buying individually-packaged bottles of Yoo-Hoo, a particularly repugnable and fangorious monkey man crept near with his +7 Cloak of Greater Invisibility and annoyed the hell out of her.  At once, she felt a new power within her, and drawing for the first time upon her primal rage, Jessica gave voice to an unworldly cry of vengeance, hulked out, and promptly broke her pocket book.  The monkey man quickly fled to the frozen bakery isle to gnaw upon one of those little ready made tubes of corn biscuits, and Jessica knew that her destiny was far more differenter than she had previously imagined it to be.

            In accordance with the law of the land and the traditions of the Ancients (who also wisely insisted that their name always be spelled with a capital A, lest they be confused with any of those other store-brand knock-off sorts of ancients), Jessica traveled across at least two states and possibly a decent sized bit of the galaxy or perhaps even some sort of eternal interdimensional barrier (which may seem like a lot, but then again, a person can’t just go gadding about the dairy isle of Wal-Mart, hulking out and breaking pocketbooks all hither and thither either).  At last after many weary minutes of travel, she arrived at her destination, Meadowbrook High School, Secret Superhero Academy (which would more likely have remained a secret longer had they not gone and put that last part there on a big sign out front for all the world to see).  There she honed her hulking skillz, riding to school each day on a fiery chariot pulled by a thousand fiery guinea pigs until Mr. Higgenbotham got tired of the parking difficulties this caused and told her to go buy a Toyota Camry like a normal person.

            And so it went, until one day at the ancient tribal gathering place of bored people without much money, Putt Putt, Jessica chanced to wear the ancient traditional made out of Mah Jonng Tiles bracelet of her people, and chanced to meet Jason, who had just finished dating the one hundred and fifty consecutive crazy girls prophesized by John Adams in a blog I wrote some months back.  Since he knew full well about this prophecy, and had been keeping track of the numbers better than anyone, he figured the odds of this new girl not being a complete and total psycho were tolerably good, and as you may have already assumed, they ended up getting along quite well together and falling in love in that sappy sort of a way that would thoroughly spoil the epic qualities of this tale were I to describe it at greater length.

            After school, Jessica secured a job as the receptionist at Grolok’s House of Torment and Hair Salon Emporium, running the cash register, answering the phones, and making sure than no vicious Narlaks got in (Narlaks, it being generally known, being completely bald anyway, and having at best a rudimentary conception of the science of tipping).  To this very day she works there yet, ever training, ever breaking pocketbooks, and awaiting the day when she and Jason, Techno-Warlord of the Electronics Department, get married and go off to slay some nameless evil or impolite beast in a suitably epic and blogaboutable manner.

            Most concerned citizens, upon hearing the news that Wal-Mart is considering building vast underground cities where their employees can live and raise their families, might be understandably concerned about the alarming social changes that such a move could bring about.  I on the other hand, could think only of one thing, “Cool!”  I mean really, a vast subterranean Wal-Mart metropolis would have all sorts of benefits to society, assuming that by benefits you mean “Things that could herald the end of humanity as we know it while simultaneously being totally friggin’ awesome”.  How, you may ask, could such a simple declaration have such great and far-reaching import?  Well, just sit back, grab a pork soda, and read on me mateys!

            Now, as most of you know, I’m no stranger to the earthy subject of sub terrene existence, whether it be concerning morlocks, supervillians, Bigfoot, or of course, Spanky, Lord of the Mole People (who may be seen exhorting his evil followers below in a picture recently sent to me by alert and perceptive teacupmammoths reader Matt Hoover).

It is with no small measure of self-aggrandizing authority then that I say that people living underneath Wal-Mart would be ineffably sweet, merely in terms of the sort of things that one could expect to happen to people who dwelt beneath a Wal-Mart for extended periods of time after say, a nuclear war or invasion by space aliens wiped out the rest of humanity, or possibly merely reduced them to a Mel Gibsonion life of desert wandering and Tina Turner battling.

First, Wal-Mart would be like, their entire world, like it was for those people who lived in that big non-Wal-Mart city in Logan’s Run.  So finally one day there’d be some disaster or something, or one of them wouldn’t want to renew, and they’d have to evacuate through the aeon-forgotten, killer robot-infested undercity maintenance tunnels, and they’d all be freaking out when they saw stuff like cars and Waffle Houses and Dick Cheney, and they’d be just start totally wiggin’ like space babes on Star Trek used to when Shatner introduced them to the concept of making out.

Next, they’d probably start to evolve in such a way as to flourish more awesomely in there kingdom of endless night.  Like, their eyes would start to get all sensitive to light and stuff, so at first, when some brave souls would venture out to scavenge materials from the overworld, they’d be wearing space goggles and funky enviro-suits made from pleather, old tires, and free AOL CDs.  Eventually though, they would grow to hate and fear the sun, and they’d get all extra white and start looking like Smeagol so that if perchance one of them was banished to the surface world for shoplifting or something, he’d have to thrive within the shadows of the night, ever cursing the sun and gnashing his unreasonably pointy teeth.

            Also, I’ll bet they’d start mutating in all sorts of freaky and improbable ways, like developing psychic powers so whenever a overworlder found his way to him, they could make him fight a giant shadow panda for their amusement.  And, lest each of their cities be an island unto itself, most of them would be connected by a series of tunnels dug with funky steampunk-looking drill trains.  But there’d be like, the one Forgotten City, where according to legend, all the wondrous secrets of the Ancients were stored that could turn all the other Wal-Marts into an earthly paradise and free them from the threat of the Mole People, who would always be trying to steal their supply of Cheese Nips and Brittany Spears CDs.  And then there’d be like, the one Forbidden Wal-Mart (That would be the Forest Hill one, if you’re wondering), where Zoltar, the Tainted One would sit and brood in darkness, plotting his revenge on those who cast him out of the high council (oh yes, there would be a high council).  And like, one day Zoltar would ally himself with Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, and he’d be all conquering all of the other Wal-Mart cities, and only the Chosen Ones, Atreyu, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Dole would escape to hunt for the Forgotten City with nothing to guide them but an old Muppet voiced by Frank Oz and a tattoo on a Welsh corgi.

            Ooh, and I bet they’d have some kind of crazy underground Wal-Mart religion, where they’d all worship a big picture of Sam Walton, or maybe a nuclear bomb they found (at least until Charlton Heston blew it up), and they’d have the Hour of Madness everyday, and everyone would go all crazy and run amok (don’t ask why, in post apocalyptic undercities, you’re required by law to have one of these).  Or maybe they’d all be Lutherans, that would be weird too, but not in the same way.

            So yeah, even if this whole Wal-Mart underground city of darkness thing happens, don’t worry too much, cause it’s gonna be pretty sweet.

            Greetings and felicitations blogheads!  I realize that this pasty week I’ve been a little light on the updates, but rest assured that now that Publick Day is over and everything is once more beer and skittles, I’ll be back to my usual schedule.  As some of you may recall, last Monday I just kind of did a blog dedicated to randomness, and it seems to have gone over pretty well, so here’s some more pure unadulterated chaos, enjoy:

            My parents were getting a new door installed, which in and of itself isn’t really all that exciting (unless you live the dullest life ever, or possibly are some kind of a sick twisted freak).  The company that was going to come and install it for us was called Wolverine Construction.  I was totally psyched about this bit of news, as you may well imagine, but I was worried they’d made some mistake.  I mean, it’s not like we needed anymore wolverines built in the house (heaven only knows, there’s more than enough already), maybe we should have called Build A New Door On Your Grandmother’s Front Porch Construction instead.  It was cool though, cause it turned out that they had decided to branch out and do doors too.  But then I was like, whoa, what if the guys who put in the door are wolverines?  So I was expecting them to be all hairy and voracious, and gnaw the old door out of its frame or something, but when their truck rolled up, I was disappointed to see that they were just a bunch of white guys.  So I was like, okay, maybe they’ve got adamantium claws or something, but lo, ‘twas not to be.  It was just a name.  Also, it turns out that some warehouse troll ate the doorknob whilst it was in storage, and they couldn’t install it today anyhow.  I was unaccountably sad.

            If you were driving around in a Transformer or some other kind of robot in disguise, and all of a sudden an evil Deceptacon and/or President Jimmy Carter appeared and started trying to turn the world’s beef supply into energon cubes or something, you’d better open the door and jump out and do some combat rolls or something, because I’ll bet that if you stayed inside, you’d be squished when he transformed into a robot that still strongly resembled a vehicle.

            The other day I was at the store, and I saw they had a four pack of tape measures.  But tape measures are like, the most unnecessary thing ever to have four of, because you never need more than one, unless you’re some kind of octopus contractor, or maybe a wolverine.  And it wasn’t they it was just four for the price of one, like if you were outfitting an entire truck of wolverines, it was the variety pack of tape measures, and they were all different in magical and fascinating ways.  Who’s their target audience on this, people with ADHD? “I wonder how long this is.  No, wait! I wonder how long this thing is!  Hark, there’s that thing over there, I must measure it as well!”  It was weird.

            Remember in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, where they say “Donatello does machines”?  That’s always weirded me out.

            There’s one of those Used To Be A 7-11 Seafood Emporiums near my house (don’t ask why, but all extinct 7-11s become either ethnic dry cleaners or ghettofabulous seafood emporiums).  Anyway, lest the fact that they sell seafood be lost on the general publick (I know that’s not how its spelled, but I think I confused my spell checker the other day, and now it won’t let me type it without the K), they made one of the O’s in “Seafood” look like a little pirate ship steering wheel, which as everybody well knows is the universal sign for snow crab legs.  Except their sign isn’t that big, so until you’re right in the parking lot, it looks like they spelled “Seafood” with a little targeting crosshairs thingie.  And that’s just confusing, like they’re trying to mess with your head or something.  It’s like having a sign that said “Day Care” and making the C into an electric juicer.  Or putting up a sign that said “Bed Bath & Beyond” only the little and thingie was a skull or a roto-tiller.  Or if you had a sign that said “Pierre’s Fine French Dining Eatatorium” and one of the Fs was shaped like a little French guy fighting against a Nazi or possibly thanking America for saving their country from whatever happened to be menacing it this fortnight.  Or maybe it’s on purpose and they’re trying to subtly let you know how they got their seafood (Hey, look!  It’s a delicious smallmouth bass!  BLAM!).

            Sometimes I worry about how we’re all just one disaster away from the fall of civilization and that beneath the fine wenge veneer on the armoire of humanity, lies the crappy particleboard shelving unit of barbarianosity.  But then I think, “Hey, twenty years ago, Vanilla Ice and Communism were both popular, and now they’re both trying to reinvent themselves as being all hard core death metal (I myself remember when Communism stopped shaving that lightning bolt into its hair) but everyone just laughs at them anyway”  So you see, we are making progress after all.  Also, now we have EZ Cheez and remote controlled air conditioners.  If that’s not proof that humanity is fast evolving into a Q-like state of omnivorosity and surliness, I don’t know what is.

            Today, it just so happens to be the case, was Publick Day at Henricus, the park at which I work at.  Since it’s a historical park, we are of course not allowed to just say that we made it up as an excuse to move roughly seven thousand folding tables all over the site, so instead here’s the real, not made up historical explanation.  You see, our ancestors had long lived in England, frolicking in the wilderness, wearing short pants, living in cute little underground houses, and hanging out with wizards and getting high.  This, as one might well imagine, was a totally sweet mode of existence and one which they would have been happy to continue with until their collective moms finally told them to stop with all the frolicking and whatnot and go get real jobs.  Unfortunately, the king of England, Queen Elizabeth, decided that really, England would never be known as a stuffy, rain-infested nation with terrible food as long as Englishmen were living carefree lives of pastoral grooviness.  As a result, she took all the cool people (and a choice selection of complete tools) and sent them all over to Virginia on three ships named El Nino, The Pinto, and the Buckwheat Bertha.  Some years later, they actually got here, and in celebration of having partially survived the trip, they proclaimed a day of awesomeness, and called it Publick Day, in recognizance of two of their most precious of freedoms:  Not having to pay $6 for an admission ticket, and being able to add all sorts of unnecessary and superfluous letters to words (Sadly, the early colonists penchant for just slapping letters around all over the place led to a shortage in subsequent years, which is why to this very day, we still have to abbreviate some words in order to balance out the universe again).

            Anyway, today was the day we did all that, and since it’s still just kind of a blur to me (a really long blur) I’m just gonna aimlessly ramble out some of the things that struck me throughout the day.

            First, and foremost, I got to wear a T-shirt today.  The thing is, since I always have to either wear my historical shirt (which kind of makes me look like a pirate, a farming pirate) or my Polo Shirt of the Damned (really, that’s what it says on the little tag in the back, and tags rarely lie about such things).  Whenever I wear a T-shirt though (especially an awesome, stylish and still totally for sale Teacupmammoths shirt), I know it means it’s my day off and I’m doing something fun.  Just for today though, we got to wear T-shirts to work, so all morning long, it was messing me up.  Like, I knew that I had to move say, the entire gift shop over into the James River, but I was still wearing a T-shirt, so I was all irrationally exuberant.  It was weird.

            Then, I spent the morning running the Free Brochures and Childrens’ Workbooks Table.  This would have been okay, except all these grownups kept coming along and taking all the kids stuff.  Like, a couple would come by and I’d be all like, “Yo, yo, yo, Homeslice!  Care for a site map or membership brochure?”  And they’d just kind of go, “Hunh…” and start leafing through one of the kids’ activity books.  Now mind you, these are quality activity books, full of stuff like those word searches that your teacher used to give you to shut you up after you finished a test and the two and a half dumb kids were still working.  So I guess these people would suddenly find a really good one or something (How many of these Historically Relevant words can you find? Beans.  Cholera.  Pantaloons.  Weasels.)  And then they’d just walk off with them (the workbooks, not the historical choleric pantaloon-wearing beanweasels, though that would make a good name for a band).  And I didn’t know whether to say something, “Excuse me sir or madam, if you’re over the age of seven, I’m going to have to ask for that back!”  Or whether I should just go with it and not do anything to shatter their childlike fantasy world of age-inappropriate activity bookage.  So mostly, I just gave out a bajillion activity books.  Maybe next year we should have some adult activity books so they won’t be mooching all the ones meant for the kids, but since I don’t think anyone would even want to think about what might go into an adult activity book, maybe I should just leave it to the professionals.

            And speaking of ice cream trucks, we had one of those too.  It wasn’t particularly historic, either in terms of being made out of like, raccoons and sailcloth (Raccoons and Sailcloth, by the way, would be a totally sweet band name as long as you could find a good gimmick for making it work) and they didn’t have old-timey ice cream flavors either, like chicory, or hardtack, or plague rat, but it was still a big hit.  You ever notice how ice cream trucks are always totally over the top, in terms of decoration?  Like, they never just put some pictures of various frozen treats and maybe a picture or two of a small child eating said treats, lest the short bused among us not be able to make the connection.  Instead, they always go completely insane, and have all these giant ice cream sandwiches and stuff dancing along with the kids, or maybe playing football or going frog gigging with the kids.  I think that’s just counter-productive, cause kids are only gonna come look at the truck and be all like, “Wha?!  Frog gigging?!  What the Hell kind of demonic freaky gateway to the netherworld ice cream truck is this?  That’s it, I’m just gonna go home and snort Pixie Stix for a while.”  Also, does it strike anyone else as a bad idea to make every ice cream truck in the known universe play the most incredibly annoying song ever?  If it didn’t herald the coming of tastiness, everyone would loathe that song, so why not stop playing with our emotions like that and choose a song that doesn’t sound like a bag full of toy poodles being dragged down an old spiral staircase?  I personally would suggest Kashmir, by Led Zepplin (which already is a totally sweet name for a band), because nobody hates it, and it’s like, an hour and a half long, so you wouldn’t have to repeat it that much.  All you’d have to do is take out an ad in the paper announcing the changeover, and then people would know what to listen for.  Then, whenever you heard someone totally blasting Kashmir as they slowly cruised through the neighborhood, everyone would be all like, “Woot, ice cream!”

            For the other seventeen hours or so, I did other stuff, but most of it wasn’t really that funny, so I’m just gonna end here, based on the principal that if anyone seriously wants to read more than two pages of blog about Publick Day, they’ll start up a grassroots effort to deluge me with requests and/or supermodels.

            I don’t think I need to take a poll to say with the greatest of certainty that pretty much everybody likes sailboats.  I mean hey, they’re boats, they’ve got a sail on them, what more could you ask for?  Therefore, I would assume that most of you would be concerned if there were some terrible sailboat blight sweeping the nation and raining untimely destruction upon untold legions of sailboats.  Well my friends, I’m afraid that’s precisely what’s happening out in California, the state where there’s nothing so utterly ridiculous that it can’t cause millions of dollars worth of destruction.  What’s causing this hideous blight upon sailboats, you may ask?  The answer, and I must warn you here that it is more retarded than you can possibly imagine, is sea lions.  No, really, I’m sober and everything, this is really happening.  Apparently, thousands of sea lions have started leaping out of the water and wallowing about on the decks of sailboats there, and, as one might suspect, when you get over fifty ginormous walrus things on a boat, it tends to sink, more often than not.  And yet, since up until now, this has never happened before, it must be asked what on Earth is making sea lions sink sailboats?

            Now, as much as I’d like to blame this all on Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, or possibly just Adolf Hitler, the simple fact is that Mole People hate the water, and Hitler can’t even swim without his little water wings, so the culprit has to be someone else.  But who do we know who loves that water, can control sea life, and hates everybody?  Yup, I’m afraid it’s Aquaman.  Some of you might question this conclusion, after all, Aquaman is part of the Justice League.  But then again, France was part of the Allies in World War II, and we all know what a bang-up job they did that time around.  The sad truth is, nobody in the Justice League ever really liked Aquaman.  Sure he’s the king of the seas, but when the last time a supervillian ever wanted to conquer the seas?  They’re already under water, what else can you do to make them more useless (unless, like Cobra Commander, you’re going to try to blow up the ocean, which is just too retarded to even comment on)?  The problem with Aquaman is that, unfortunately, when he’s on land he’s just fruity-looking guy with fish pants and a bronze wife-beater, which might make him a force to be reckoned with if he was part of the Total Sissy League, but since that’s a completely fictitious league that I just dreamed up to illustrated his wussetude, he’s pretty much completely unimpressive, unless you’re into fish pants, in which case you are most definitely a freak.  The one thing that Aquaman can do, however, is control anything that lives in the ocean.  Whales, kelp, Jacques Cousteau, Kevin Costner, these brute beasts are his only friends and servants. 

            So, since Aquaman has clearly, as a result of being blatantly, ineffably, and humorously useless, he’s decided to become evil.  Unfortunately, when the best you can do, superpower-wise, is try to destroy Washington D.C. with angry kelp (Aquaman and the Angry Kelp, by the way, would make a totally sweet name for a band that didn’t mind tainting itself with the suckiness that is Aquaman), you’re not going to get very far in your mad quest for global domination (especially when Dick Cheney retaliates with his superpower of hurling lightning bolts at total losers).  So, lacking a plan capable of bringing us surface-dwellers to our knees, Aquaman has instead chosen to do what all potentially evil, yet tragically lame people do:  be really annoying.  To this end, Aquaman has marshaled his vast army of sea lions off the coast of California, and commanded them to jump out of the water and sink sailboats.  Here, far from the watchful eye of Dick Cheney and his electric robo-baboon army, Aquaman’s hideous plans come to vile fruition as untold dozens of innocent sailboats are sent to the murky depths of whichever ocean it is over on that side of the country.

            How did we let things get this bad in the first place?  By coddling sea creatures.  Seriosuly, except for a select few ocean creatures (the flatulent coral of the Sargasso and the surly flounder of the Bosporus immediately spring to mind), pretty much everything in the ocean is endangered and federally protected, and has been since the 70s, when at last we forgot the carnage and bloodshed of the Great Manatee Wars of the 18^th century.  As a result, everything that lives in the ocean has gotten all cocky, and now the metaphorical chickens of vengeance have come home roost (The Metaphorical Chickens of Vengeance, by the way, would make such an awesome band name that I’m almost tempted to take up playing the Jew’s harp again.  Almost.).

            What can each of us do to help then, to turn the tide of this submarine war which throws itself upon us as the metaphorical fat drunken frat dude of foreign aggression upon the hot yet thoroughly non-skanky babe of America?  The answer is clear, it’s high time we started putting the oceans and all of its foul denizens back where it belongs, below sea level.  How can you help?  By putting the smack down on any and all sea creatures you meet in your daily life.  That baby seal you pass at Sheetz every day?  Club it.  That orca at work who keeps stealing all of your post-it notes at the office?  Go Captain Ahab on his ass (whales think they’re so great anyway, “Ooh, look, I’m a mammal but I live under water!  Aren’t I special?” what a bunch of freaks).  In a battle like this, there can be no quarter asked, and none given, so even if you see the Little Mermaid while you’re out at Linens n’ Things, call in the sushi bar next door on her.

            Let’s face it, the ocean already has two thirds of the planet in its damp thrall, the last thing we need to be doing is letting them just flop in here and take over the rest of it.  So, all ye good people of Blog World, I call upon thee to rise up against this marine menace and smack it back into the Pleistocene Epoch, right where it belongs.  And Aquaman, if you’re reading this, I know what you’re up to, and so do Dick Cheney and his robo-baboons.

            Well, here it is, the middle of September again, and everyone knows what that means.  Except maybe they don’t, so I’m gonna say what it means anyways.  It means that many, if not all, of you college students, retirement home dwellers, and convicted felons are probably starting to hate your roommates.  Now, some of you might feel a little guilty about this (except for the convicted felons, y’all have enough to feel guilty about already so don’t go getting all angsty on me), but the fact is that a full 87% of roommates are, scientifically speaking, crazy psycho freaks who you really need to get out of your room as soon as possible in the interest of protecting your own sanity, as well as other such laudable goals as taking both the mattresses in the room and making a little fort out of them or possibly just sitting around in your underwear all day singing 99 Luft Balloons (the cool version though, where everything is in German except for the part about Captain Kirk).  “But what can I do?” you may be asking, “My roommate is clearly far more crazy than I am, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to scare him/her/it away without using a flamethrower full of Gummi Bears!”  Fear not young Padawan (that has got to be in the top ten dorkiest things I have ever written here and I apologize for it), for I have more experience getting rid of annoying roommates than anyone else I’ve ever met; experience which I am about to share with you, that you may at last be free of whatever evil your roommate happens to be the earthly embodiment of, whether it be too much partying, smelling like a fetid yak corpse, believing themselves to be a rapper, or merely looking like Fred Savage.  Now, some people (your R.A. and/or your mom) are going to tell you that you ought to go to the Office of Ineffective Guidance Counselors Who Have Never Lived in the Real World, where you and your roommate can work through your disagreements together, and do stuff like draw up contracts and emote and eventually go on long walks on the beach together, because these programs are all actually underwritten by the Communist Party, with the intent of making you a total and unadulterated wuss.  So instead, just do these things:

            First, get a weird hobby.  It doesn’t have to be incredibly weird, like making possums into handbags, it can just be something unusual, like making medieval armor for instance.  The secret here is that the crazier your roommate is, the more likely they are to think of themselves as normal, and the more likely they are to be freaked out if your conversations all start out with, “Don’t mind the trebuchet, I’ll be taking it out on the Quad in a week or two.” Or, “No, no, don’t worry, it’s strictly non-lethal.  Though come to think of it, I could probably fix that in a jiffy.”

            Most people hate at least a couple of the following kinds of music: Dixieland, Techno, Anime Soundtracks, Polkas, and Listening to Petula Clark Songs Backwards to Find the Satanic Messages in Them.  All you have to do is experiment a little and find out which one of these you happen to have a relatively high tolerance to, while at the same time driving your roommate absolutely insane with rage.  And since pretty much all roommate feuds start with your roommate playing the most hideous music imaginable, when they complain you can just say, “But I never complain when you listen to Vanilla Ice sixteen hours a day.”  Say it all innocently too, like you really don’t see what the big deal is.

            One day while they’re out at class or something, totally mess up your side of the room, then take your shirt off, put on a pair of enormous purple pants, and when you hear them coming down the hall, start shouting and banging on the walls.  Then, when they open the door, lie on the floor looking dazed.  If they ask what happened, say you got angry and don’t want to talk about it anymore.  When they keep bugging you, say “You’re making me angry; you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” and suddenly run out of the room making as much noise as you can in the hall.

            Start playing an MMORPG all the time.  Then start talking about it all the time, as if your character is your soulmate or something, and how terribly important it is that they understand everything about your character.  Eventually, insist that your roommate call your by your MMORPG name, and start making idle comments about how you’re they need to respect you because you’re a level 47 Elf Priestess.  If they get angry, mention how many hit points you have, and talk about how many levels you have invested in your Dodge skill.  Finally, when they wake up one day, shout, “By the Hoary Hordes of Hoggoth! An Orc Scout, I must alert the Temple Guard!” Then run out of the room and don’t come back for two days.

            Get a toad.  Lick it, and pretend to trip out and do all sorts of crazy stuff.  If your roommate calls the authorities, deny it all and let the test the toad.  If your roommate is a stoner or something and wants to lick the toad too, act really surprised when it doesn’t do anything to them.  Then, get angry and tell them they must have broken it.

            Stay up all night watching anime and drinking wine coolers.  In the morning, just sit there looking wired and strung out.  When they ask if you’re okay, say “Nani?” and pretend you can’t understand English.  If they get frustrated with you, try to throw a Hadoken at them, and when it doesn’t work, look unspeakably perplexed for a moment, then start crying and run out of the room.  If you do happen to successfully Hadoken them, you so totally need to tell me your secret, because the whole ↓→B thing isn’t working for me.

            Whenever any of their friends come over, act completely normal and friendly.

            Get a dictionary.  Keep it by itself in a drawer of your desk.  Whenever your roommate comes in, hurriedly close it, throw it in the drawer, and act like you weren’t doing anything.  Start blatantly using vocabulary words around them, then look really smug.

            Rent Apollo 13 one day.  The next day, announce that you’ve decided to become an astronaut and get rid of your bed.  Cover one of your walls with Velcro, and then make a suit for yourself out of the other kind of Velcro.  Sleep on the wall at night.  Roll around a lot in your sleep.  Whenever you see them getting into bed like a normal person, shake your head and look mildly disgusted.

            Get a bunch of mood rings and wear them all at the same time.  Rush into the room and declare, “Alright man, now there’s gonna be a reckoning!  Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Monkeys!”  Throw your arms into the air, and gaze about yourself with a look of manic triumph.  After a few seconds, start looking around like you expect to see Captain Planet, or possibly Dick Cheney.  When neither of them appears, mumble an incoherent apology and take a nap.

            Well, there you have it, whatever it is.  Go forth, and if you try these Ben-tested methods, you’ll be the envy of everyone else on the floor before you know it.

            Just to change things up a little bit and do my part to make the world a more confusing place, I’m a gonna depart from my regular format for the night and just put up a few random thoughts and observations which will hopefully mask the fact that its late and I’m not thinking coherently enough to write a real blog tonight.  Be forewarned however, for what you are about to read below is like, pure 200 proof Benthink.  So you might want to have a few beers first lest any of it make sense to you.

            Suppose you happened to be a convicted felon, and it came to pass that improbably enough, you were having brunch with the governor.   Suppose then also that after this repast, you happened to summon forth a mighty belch, and said, “Pardon me.”  And then, if the governor said “Sure” would that mean you were free to go?

            The other day I passed an Ethiopian restaurant.  At first I thought it was some sort of a gag, like a Chinese Big & Tall, or a French Bed, Bath, & Beyond.  But then the altogether terrible thought occurred to me that it might be legit.  That’s awful though, cause they already don’t have any food over there, what are they doing sending what food they’ve got over here where it might as well rain éclairs every day (I love Microsoft Word, it automatically put that little homeless apostrophe over the E in eclair even though I didn't care enough to add one in manually)(Hey, it didn't do it that time, what gives?)?  It also means they probably sent one of their few remaining Ethiopian chefs over here too, and that’s just not cool.  That’d be like if we rounded up all the white guys with dancing ability in America and then sent all five of them to somewhere where everybody can dance already, like, um, Djibouti, which though the fact is little known here in the states is generally known over in the Middle East as The Funkytown of the Gulf of Aden.

            When you go to Panera, they always ask you your name so when your sandwich is ready they can just call you and you can go up and get it.  But that sucks, cause whenever I go with my parents, my dad orders, and his name is Bob.  And every time we’re eating there, it’s like we’ve chosen to go on the same night as the Great Festival of a Thousand Bobs, so when they call him, like, fifty other guys named Bob come running too.  That’s why whenever you go to Panera, you ought to come up with some awesome and original name, like Abominus the Desecrator.  If there’s more than one of those in the restaurant, you probably don’t want to meet the other one.  Or, when you go up say that you’re name is Bob Dole, and that way when they call you up, everyone else will be all, “Huh?! Bob Dole?! In Panera?!” and they’ll be all looking around and stuff, and maybe you’ll even get some Bob Dole groupies (of which there are many).

            People always ask their friends, “Would you take a bullet for me?”  But that’s totally lame, cause you’re kinda guilting them into it with a question like that.  Instead, how about asking, “Would you take a mullet for me?”  No one’s gonna lie on that one, and then you’ll know who all you’re true friends are.  Also, if a mullet-wielding madman ever starts running towards you, you can just be like, “Hey Abominus the Desecrator, time to make good on your promise!” and then throw him to the mullet fiend (also, The Mullet-Wielding Madmen would make a somewhat unwieldy name for a band, so I’m gonna suggest it for a large, multinational corporation instead).

            You know that commercial where there’s that random Indian standing by the highway and someone drives by and throws a potato chip bag out the window and he cries?  Maybe it’s not about the environment at all.  I think what that Indian is probably thinking is more along the lines of this:

Hey, here comes another car!  Maybe this one will pick me up and drive me to Atlantic City!  Maybe I shouldn’t have just worn a loincloth if I’d known I was gonna be thumbing a ride all the way there.  Nuts, he’s not gonna stop!  Ooh, what’s this?  He’s throwing something out the window for me!  It’s a bag!  Man, I hope it’s full of Doritos, I could really go for some Doritos right now.  What the?!  It’s empty!  What kind of jerk tempts a big loincloth-wearing Indian with Doritos like that?  Damn, now I’m all sad.

Indians love Doritos.

I spend a lot of time in hardware stores.  And if I stopped right there, that would be the least thought, ever.  Fortunately there’s more.  You see, they sell a lot of goggles and various other eye protectors there at said hardware emporium, and all the snazzy futuristic-looking ones have pictures on them of all these attractive young people standing outside, mostly not doing anything that should require fashionable yet dependable eye defense, though there’s always one guy welding Batarangs just so you don’t forget what the goggles are for.  “I’m certainly glad I’ve got these trendy goggles to protect my eyes as I protect the city from evildoers!”  he seems to say.  Anyway, further on down the isle they’ve always got the discount goggles, that don’t make you look like the Matrix, they make you look like Mr. Flugelman, the Shop teacher from your middle school.  But instead of trying to play it off and put cool-looking people on the box, they always just go ahead and find the biggest, dorkiest-looking, whitest white guy ever and put a picture of him riding his lawnmower and looking like the least cool thing ever to walk the face of the Earth.  “Look at me!  I’m a big white guy riding a lawnmower and wearing goggles just in case it decides to shoot sparks at my face!  I only paid a buck fifty for these!  Gorp, gorp, gorp!”  Honestly, it’s just sad.

You know how we call that thing where everybody gets out of the car and runs around it before taking a seat other than their original one a Chinese fire drill?  I’ll bet that in China they just call that a fire drill.  And you know that thing where they set off the fire alarm on purpose so everyone can practice leaving the building in a safe and orderly fashion to escape the theoretical fire?  I’ll bet they call that an American fire drill.

If you’re ever in the restroom at Panera or something and there’s some other guy in there talking on the phone like he’s such a big powerful business executive that he can’t possibly hang up while he takes a leak, don’t just sit there and rage in idleness.  Rather, wait until you’re sure that there’s no one else around, and then unlock your mighty word-horde and shout, “Thunder, Thunder, Thundercrap! Hoooo!!”  and then cut loose with a Force 10 Pantsbuster or a reasonable approximation thereof.  Depending on who he’s talking to, you’ll probably get him fired, or possibly dumped (which would be additionally funny, owing to the multiple possible meanings of the word “dump”).

No matter who is in the car next to you, it is never a good idea to rawk out to Brittany Spears at a stoplight with your windows down and the bass crankin’.  Especially if the person in the car next to you happens to be the Pope or Dick Cheney.  Unless it's both of them together, and they're on some kind of a Footloose and Fancy Free partying montage where they go into town and chase pigeons in the fountain and then they go try on lots of funny hats while some Cindy Lauper song plays in the background.  That would be kind of cool.

Whenever I go to the post office, they always have all these ads up for postage stamps.  But’s that’s retarded, cause you don’t have a choice about it anyway.  “Mailing a letter?  Why not try Stamps?  It’s just ridiculous.  Have people found another way to convey letters and other physical objects to distant locales that I’m just not aware of?  Are we all using owls now?  Did somebody invent a transporter and decide to use it solely to convey their personal correspondence and occasional cable bill around?  If the post office didn’t tell people, would they just start driving everywhere that they wanted to send a letter to?  “Crap, it’s time to send Aunt Clarice her birthday card again, and she lives all the way out in Saskatchewan!  I wish there were somebody else who could take it there for me for ¢37!  What’s that you say?  Stamps?  How very novel, is this a new thing they’re trying?  Oh.  My bad.”

            Growing up in the 80s, as certain members of the younger generation might well be unaware (yes, Lindsay Lohan, I mean you), had a certain way of bringing together those of us who were raised during that particular golden era of human history.  There were in those marvelous days, and still remain to this day, people, things, and events which will forever bind us together whether we want to or not, just as the Planeteers had to keep the Heart kid around if they wanted to summon Captain Planet.  Our shared experiences during the closing days of the Cold War, as well as all the other epic and historic challenges that the 80s represent, are in fact generally not all that memorable, since most of us were seven years old at the time.  As one might imagine, most of us were really none too worried about all the great and important things because the mental world of an 80s child could be accurately described thusly:

            Now, I know we’ve all changed a little since then (I myself rarely dwell long on the deeper meaning of Pop-Tarts anymore), but I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you think about it way too hard late on a Saturday night, Thundercats is a lot like Gilligan’s Island.  But with robo koalas.  No, no, I’m not crazy, hear me out.  You see, if you think about it, you’ll see as well as I have the number of eerie similarities and parallels between Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island.

            For instance, on Thundercats, everybody always wore the exact same clothes, every single day, just like on Gilligan’s Island.  I mean, everyone has always wondered how Gilligan wore that red shirt every day of his life without needing a new one (much less being eaten by a Horta or having all the iron in his body sucked out by an evil cloud monster, not to mention being bitten by a big, white, uni-ape), but has anyone ever asked why Lion-O had a wardrobe composed solely of a single blue unitard of eternal vigilance?  I mean, at least Gilligan didn’t have anything else to make a shirt from except for bamboo and guest stars, but the Thundercats were way more resourceful than that.

            Next, on both Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island, they could build pretty much anything they wanted, as long as it wasn’t a ship to get them off their planet/island.  The Professor could build a radio out of coconuts if he wanted to, and Gilligan could make little cars out of bamboo, along with things like hot tubs, home entertainment centers, electron tunneling microscopes, anything at all.  Panthro, on the other hand (who, much like the professor was the all-knowing technically masterful babe magnet who nevertheless remained mysteriously single) started out with a crashed spaceship and ten minutes later had built a totally sweet thematically unified Thunder Fortress (and yes, I know that’s not what it was really called, but for copyright-related reasons, I am unable to use its proper name, The Sanctuary of Snarf), and then, when Lion-O (whose name I am loathe to type due to the thoroughly unnecessary hyphen it contains) started whinging about how that wasn’t good enough, Panthro went and threw together a tank just to shut him up.

            Just as Lion-O was the chosen one, who alone had the power to defeat Mumm-Ra, likewise was Gilligan the chosen one who looked exactly like the god of the headhunters, thereby enabling him to save is island-dwelling homies from near-certain death.

            And let us not forget that while Gilligan’s band was brought to the island by the Skipper, a big dude in a blue shirts, the Thundercats were brought to Third Earth by Jaga, a dead Obi-Wan Kenobi-looking guy, who was also blue.  Pretty creepy, eh?

            And let’s not forget the striking parallels between the Monkeyans that the Thundercats fought, and the love-crazed chimpanzee that was always hitting on Gilligan (no, not Mrs. Howell, the other one).

            And remember how Mumm-Ra was this gnarly little undead dude who would often go and stand in his big pyramid and be all like, “Spirits of Evil, blobbity blobbity blah, make me all beefy and badass, Mumm-Ra, the EVER-LIVING!!!”  At first this might seem a little out of place, but not to those of us who have seen the rare episode of Gilligan’s Island where Zha Zha Gabor gets stranded on the island and does the exact same thing.  Really, you need to go out and rent it sometime, it happens.

            Clearly, some TV executive somewhere realized early on that while Gilligan’s Island was a great source of important values and moral lessons, it was, in a very real way, just a little too classy and refined for the children of America to grasp.  Therefore, the idea to make a cartoon based upon the same premise and wrought in terms that children and the sort of adults who have to get cliff notes for Danielle Steele novels could understand.  Thus was Thundercats born, for which we are all both richer and wiser.

            Okay, as most of you who haven’t been living in a cave this week probably already know, Gilligan is dead.  Now, were I to just stop here, this would be a depressingly un-Benlike blog, so clearly I’m still just setting the stage.  Of course a thousand other blogs, European heads of state, and various and sundry poobahs (The Various and Sundry Poobahs, by the way, would make an excellent name for a band) have probably already gone public with all manner of eulogizing of a far better nature than anything that I could possibly write in memoriam of Bob Denver, who, to the best of my knowledge, is related to neither John Denver nor Denver the Last Dinosaur (he’s my friend and a whole lot more!™).  Anyways, lest there be any doubts as to whether I mean this honestly or facetiously, just let me state in the most unequivocal of terms that I am, and have been since at least as far back as the Reagan Administration, a total Gilligan fan.  Seriously, he’s like the older quasi-retarded brother I never had, or if I did, he was abducted by dinosquirrels before I was born and my parents never told me.  I learnt so much about life from Gilligan, like how to get a bowling ball stuck on your hand and turn invisible, or what to do if a monkey is throwing exploding dinner plates at you, or that if you find a lion and/or a mine down by the lagoon, you should definitely tell the Skipper right away.  But what has often been overlooked these past few days by all those extolling the virtues of Gilligan is the very important fact that he was, in addition to being a source of inspiration for untold billions of sentient beings on this and countless other worlds, but also that he was a critical part of our victory over the Red Menace (no, not helltoads, though they’re bad too), The Soviet Union.  Gilligan, you see, was no merely an entertainer, but also a patriot, a positive bulwark of awesomeness against the commie peril or the 1960s.  Finally it can be told, the wonderful, terrible truth behind Gilligan’s Island.

            Though we didn’t know it at the time, most people in Russia back in the day, were less than completely enthused about Communism.  Sure it came with some bitchin’ hats, and national leaders who weren’t afraid to beat a shoe on the table at the U.N., but there were also more than a few drawbacks, such as insanely long toilet paper lines, getting killed by the KGB, and the fact that by the age of fifty, all Russian women who weren’t actively being seduced by James Bond looked like hideous potato trolls in nappy scarves.  So yeah, there was some resentment there.  When Gilligan’s Island came on though, the simmering cup of civil unrest noodles at last boiled over onto the hotplate of Soviet domestic stability.  How, you may ask?  Simple, when people in Russia saw Gilligan’s Island, they were filled with awe at the way that Americans, even Americans stuck on an island, were so much better off than they themselves were.  “Look, Gilligan screwed up again and the Skipper’s not having him executed!” they would exclaim.  Or, “Hey, how come they have a helicopter made out of bamboo?  If Russia’s such a worker’s paradise, where’s my bamboo helicopter?”  The Soviet leaders knew that if something wasn’t done soon, the Soviet Union was going to unravel like a cheap dog sweater on the cute little cocker spaniel of freedom.  Therefore, Nikita Khruschev, already angry because he had a girly first name, decreed that Russia would create it’s own sitcom about a bunch of people on an island on a tropical island in the middle of the North Sea, thereby showing that there was no American idea so awesome that the Soviets wouldn’t try to copy it like a bunch of unoriginal losers.

            The Skipper was to be played by Yuri Gagarin, who, after the failure of the Russian version of “I Dream of Jeannie” needed a new gig anyway.  Gilligan was to be played by Josef Stalin, who would get into wacky situations every week before ordering the deaths of all those who dared to laugh at him, after which he would go back and Photoshop them out of every picture ever taken of them.  The Professor was played by Dmitri Mendeleyev, who would always be building radios out of walruses and explaining how impossible stuff had just happened by using hokey made-up Russian science.  Mary Ann was played by Rasputin, who looked improbably fetching in pigtails, but never really got into the part since he was still stewing about how the Americans had co-opted the demon he tried to summon for Hitler.  Ginger was played by a very young Gorbachev, who just grew his Great Red Spot out for the part and combed it back, thereby looking incredibly bizarre and thoroughly unsexy.  Mr. and Mrs. Howell were played by nobody since they were both evil bourgeoisie capitalist oppressors and no self-respecting Russian desert Island would put up with that sort of thing.

            Needless to say, the show was a complete failure, despite the fact that it featured a wide array of Russian film stars including Peter the Great, Don Knotts, Ivan the Terrible, and Karl Marx in an orangutan costume.  The peace-loving workers and farmers of the U.S.S.R. continued to prefer the American version of the show, and a mere thirty years later, the Evil Empire collapsed and the leaders of the free world threw a Muppet Dance Party the likes of which had never been seen before.

            So when your thoughts turn once more to Gilligan (as those of all good people often do) don’t just remember him as a comedian, ninja, and one-time Harlem Globetrotter, but also as a hero who probably ought to be put on the next dollar coin the U.S. Mint is foolish enough to think anybody would actually use.

            If you go back far enough, pretty much everybody is descended from somebody famous, or better yet, infamous (except for people who aren’t, and just decide to lie about it anyway; so if you ever meet someone claiming to be descended from George Washington or Uncle Fester be aware they’re just trying to beef ya).  Most people’s ancestors seem to have lived lives full of romance and adventure, and doing all sorts of other things that would be kind of impressive if not for the fact that it’s just kind of expected that most people’s ancestors did things like invent the ham sandwich or invent the first monkey-fez.  As you might have suspected, my own forefathers came not from so common a mold, rather, as family legend goes, most of them spent their time looking craggy and running away from Indians (Like, a whole bunch of Indians, mind you, not just a few.  More Indians than there are in Cleveland even.  Yeah, that many.).  Also, one of them jumped off a cliff in Pittsburgh while indulging in this great family tradition.  In fact, if you go back far enough, pretty much everybody I’m related to has some connection to either running away from Indians or Pittsburgh, which is kinda weird, come to think of it.  Also, according to family legend, I am the proud descendent of the only family ever to go out West on the Oregon Trail, live in Oregon for a couple of years, and then get so bored with things there that they came back (though at least the traffic on the Eastbound lanes must have been a lot lighter).  I guess what I’m trying to say is, my family is weird, and they always have been.  So let’s just pretend that that was a terribly witty segue instead of a rambling, nonsensical paragraph full of goofiness, and get on to telling the story of one of America’s greatest and most poorly documented folk heroes, Bigfoot Wallace.  Now, being as how there’s that whole poorly documented thing, a lot of this is going to be written in accordance with the fine historical tradition that we professionals like to call “making up stuff and hoping that nobody ever calls you on it”.  That said, here we go.

            Born in Virginia in 1817, Bigfoot Wallace (who, according to my sources was not, scientifically speaking, a Sasquatch, Yeti, or Abominable Anything of any sort whatsoever) probably had your regular old American folk hero upbringing.  He spent his days wandering through the woods, wrestling trees and chopping bears into firewood.  He was most certainly not killed in a bar when he was only three, but statistically speaking, it’s almost certain that somewhere along the line he found a large blue animal freezing in a blizzard somewhere and adopted it, after which point it inexplicably grew to an enormous size and followed him in all his travels thereafter, like some kind of blue wookie or something.  I’m really temped to go with the giant blue squirrel route, but since recent evidence suggests that Bob Dole already has one of those, I’m gonna be a bit more original and say it was an enormous stoat of some kind, and it was probably named after some great American baseball player or another.  Also, in case any among you doubt the veracity of my tale, just check out the nose on old Bigfoot there.  That, my friends, is the same nose that every single man in my family (and a good share of the women) has had ever since my great, great, great, grandfather, Og Strohm first evolved away his tail (big mistake, Grampa Og) and ran away from the first big group of Cave-Indians somewhere around what would someday become Pittsburgh.  Also, he kind of looks like Zephram Cochrane, which if you’re a dork (and if you’re reading this, you probably are) opens up all sorts of temporal paradoxes and stuff.

            Anyways, in 1836, Bigfoot Wallace learned that his older brother had been killed in the Texan War for Independence.  So he put a colander on his head, grabbed a sack of yams, and headed West with his faithful giganamous blue stoat, Willie Stargell.  Unfortunately, Bigfoot Wallace also had the family sense of punctuality and by the time he got to Texas, the war was already over.  Happily enough though, there were already a number of good hardware stores in the area, so he just decided to stay and become a Texas Ranger (This, might I add, would have made an infinitely more awesome show than anything about Chuck Norris.  Unless Chuck Norris had like, a flying battleship and a giant blue Gila monster named Roberto Clemente). 

            Anyhow, Bigfoot Wallace went on to fight in the Mexican War and probably spent the rest of his time doing all that obligatory folk hero stuff like rasslin tornados and carving Mount Rushmore with nothing but a pocket knife and a bag of moldy yams.  Most say that he died in 1899 and has remained dead since.  I suspect that he probably just went back to the 21^st century so he could finish his warp ship and bring the first Vulcans to Earth.  Either way, if you’re reading this, Bigfoot, send me a comment or something, and maybe a giant blue gibbon called Dizzy Dean.  That would be totally cool.

            So, here it is, Labor Day, a day in which we Americans celebrate the awesomeness of our nation much as our forefathers did, by driving all over the country in ridiculous urban assault vehicles named after endangered trees and vanquished Spanish naval forces (Abraham Lincoln himself was a big fan of this, and often could be seen cruising around Illinois in his Eponymous towncar, which, being as how dinosaurs still roamed the Earth instead of turning into oil as they all did in later years, actually ran by burning squirrels, which were at the time our nation’s leading export).  But hark, with gas prices way totally high, this great American tradition is in great and sucky peril as never before.  What made gas prices go up so much anyways?  While most of the folks on TV say it has something to do with China using it all to build Robeasts and Coldstone Creameries, the truth is that Spanky and the Mole People have been stealing it all from underground pipelines as they foolishly pursue their mad scheme to build a chain of subterranean gas stations thus cornering the global Shmuffin market and bring the world to its knees.  Also, the Amish are buying it all just to mess with us.  Whatever the case may be, its certain that until Dick Cheney finally finds a way to turn his idea for flying monkey chariots into a marketable product, we all need to be looking at ways to conserve gas and save money (not carpooling though, that’s how Satan gets to work in the morning).  Without further ado (there having been quite enough ado already here), let’s take a look at a few of the options available to the traveler on a budget.

            Get a Conestoga wagon.  Now, that might not seem terribly efficient, seeing as how your average ox, even on the best of days, can rarely travel at highway speeds.  But think about it for a second, Conestoga wagons are what people took on the Oregon Trail, which was really the ultimate road trip of all time (okay, maybe the penultimate road trip of all time, if you want to go way back in the day and count the Exodus, though that’s a story for another blog altogether).  I mean, if someone can take a wagon all the way across the country, don’t go and act like you’re all of a sudden too good to drive one to work everyday.  Just make sure that you bring plenty of wagon tongues (I don’t even know what those are for, but trust me, you’ll need ‘em) and whenever you get to a river, just hire an Indian to take you across, unless you want to sink and lose all your ammunition and family members.

            Go with the Mad Max method, and start living like you’re in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  How do you do this?  Simple, first get a sweet looking leather jacket and a crossbow (if, like myself, you’ve already got this equipment, you might want to go ahead and try this on your way to work tomorrow), then get a bunch of crazy stuff like cowcatchers and harpoon guns and stick them in your car.  Then just run any mutants you see off the road and after delivering them to a swift and fiery death, take the gas from their car.  While some might criticize this method owing to its horrible ruthlessness/total awesomeness, just remember, Mel Gibson did it first, and he’s fought the British, space aliens, and Pontius Pilate, so anything he came up with can’t be but so bad.

            Get a hover conversion done on your car.  Now, I’m not sure if this would actually help you to save gas, but it would be pretty cool.  Also, as long as you go all the way and get a Mr. Fusion and a couple of flux capacitors installed, all you have to do is go back in time to when gas was cheaper and buy some then.  Just make sure you don’t change history by making out with Leah Thomson or stepping on any butterflies, that can be trouble.  Though on the other hand, 1980s Leah Thompson was pretty makeoutable, and butterflies are so much fun to stomp on, don’t feel too bad if you end up doing either of these things.

            Get a Segway.  No, I’m lying, Segways are one of those things like eugenics, Communism, and the Metric System, where they seemed like a good idea once, but after they killed 20 million people they didn’t seem quite so cool after all.  Besides, George Bush the Elder fell off of one once, and that’s just not cool.

            Switch you car over to steam power.  Why?  Well, because if you do, your car can burn anything to go.  Wood, coal, propane, kittens, emo kids, whatever’s cheapest that day, just throw a heap of ‘em in the hopper and light it up.  Also, your call will make that cool chugga chugga sound like a train, and if you plan ahead, you can even get one of those totally sweet whistles installed.

            Get some of those Russian-made power boots.  Never heard of such a thing?  Oh, they’re all too real, believe you me.  You see, after the fall of the Soviet Union, all the Russian scientists who’d spent all their careers working on ways to kill us capitalist pig-dogs were unemployed.  Some of them got jobs working at the Food Lion in the Outer Banks, but most of them either went rogue and started building killer robots or decided to make cool stuff.  One of them made the gasoline-powered boots that can make a man run 25 mph.  Think about that for a minute, the way you’d look as you leapt through traffic like a briefcase-toting gazelle, while all those other chumps sat stuck in traffic.  And should you get to work only to find that the city is in peril and you need to rush off somewhere, you’ve still got the boots to give you awesomely superhuman jumping powers, so you could become some jumpy thing-themed superhero, like Toad Boy, or Kangalad, or Goofy Looking Cracker with Some Boots On.  Whatever, the point is that you should get some of these boots.

            So there you have it, all the answers to all your gasoline woes.  Now just go out and try a few of these handy methods and be amazed at the results.  Happy Trails.

            As all of you who read the newspaper probably already know, this is Dagwood and Blondie’s 75^th anniversary.  Leaving aside for the moment all of the observations which I could make regarding the two of them (for instance, why did Blondie abandon her lucrative 80s band in favor of opening a catering business, and how come Dagwood eats a jillion sandwiches a day while staying skinny as a rail?  My guess is that he’s probably addicted to toad-licking, or as we call in on the streets, “Doing the T”), I’m just going to focus on how weird this entire anniversary thing is just bay itself.  For instance, if they’ve been married 75 years, that means that, assuming they’re not part of some weird Indian childhood elephant-giving arranged marriage, then they’re at least 93 years old.  C’mon now, a healthy diet and exercise will only carry a person so far, and I think we all deserve a better explanation.  I suspect that Dagwood and Blondie are both actually vampires or one of your other less common varieties of greater undead, and then each night they transform into their true hideous forms and fly out the window to go and feast on the blood of the innocent (this is why Dagwood is always late getting to work, he’s still hung over from the previous night’s horrible death-feast).  Or, maybe they’re like the Dread Pirate Roberts, and every so many years they choose someone else to take their place while they return to their ancestral birthplace in lower Madagascar to eat carob nuts and hurl koalas at one another.  Or maybe Dagwood made a pact with a demonic being back in the day (demonic being flavor of the month: Jamocha Double Fudge Cthulhu) and gained for himself a perpetually hot wife and immortality, but at the cost of the single dorkiest haircut in all of human history (worse even than that of little-remembered Saxon monarch Brokthlurgh Death-Mullet) and always having to wear a ridiculous talisman of power smack dab in the middle of his shirt.

            But whatever, it matters not.  The real mystery is how he and Blondie got all the other cartoon characters to put aside their differences and go to a big party peaceably.  Take Hagar the Horrible, for instance.  Even assuming he has a time machine (which, according to today’s paper, he does) why would he just go to the party and have a good time?  I mean, he’s a Viking, he’s gotta be fighting the urge to do some serious pillaging.  Really, the strip ought to show him and his horde standing on Dagwood’s front porch with all their torches and stuff, with Lucky Eddie coming out of the house and saying “Sorry, Hagar, they say they just got a new carpet installed and we have to wipe our feet.”  Because that always happens when Hagar goes anywhere, he’s got to the be least murderous Viking ever, unless every day right after the third panel ends, he and his troops fall into an orgy of untold carnage and bloodshed, which would actually be kind of cool.

            And what about all the comics who didn’t show up for the party?  I mean, Curtis is some kid from the inner city and he made it to the party, Dick Tracy was able to take enough time off from fighting improbably yet serendipitously-named deformed theme villains to drop by, even that Christian caveman guy managed to show up, despite the fact that everybody knows that Dagwood is so totally a Darwin groupie and a noted Atheist.  Who’s missing from this picture?  Yup, Mark Trail.  Now, I understand that during the week Mark Trail has lately been busy with his Retarded Murderess Skunk Lady Canoe Trip of Doom (full details in a blog yet to come), but what’s old Mark doing this Sunday?  I’ll tell you what, he’s watching kangaroos make out.  C’mon Mark, you can indulge in your vile perversions on your own time, today someone else needed you for once and you just had to go get a little time at the Outback.  Jeez man, you need an intervention or something.

            And where’s Snoopy?  According to today’s paper, he had already promised to take Woodstock and his homies on a “picnic”, but what’s up with that?  I think we can all see that someone thinks they’re too good to hang out with all the other talking animals at Dagwood’s Party.  Honestly Snoopy, are you saying you think you’re too good to hang out with such greats as Garfield, Grimmy, and That Annoying Little Oval Headed Kid from Family Circus?  At least Funky Winkerbean was off stepping on a landmine in Afganistan, and he’s been such a downer lately you wouldn’t want him at a party anyhow.

            Also, who’s that guy in the back row, between Dick Tracy and Ziggy (who, by the way, must be wearing a jet pack or something, cause he looks like he’s about seven feet tall)?  He kind of looks like Aquaman (the pansy Superfriends version) or maybe the distilled evil of every boy band ever all boiled down and poured into one hideous ungodly abomination of a human being.  His short kind of looks like he might be Captain Marvel, though everyone knows that Captain Marvel hates Ziggy with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns and has ever since Ziggy stole his prom date back in the 70s.  I suspect he’s actually a Communist Chinese secret agent, sent to steal our country’s humor secrets and use them to improve the only comic they have back in China (it’s pretty lame right now; it’s most just about Chairman Mao living in a Canadian Suburb and getting frustrated with his incompetent coworkers while trying to balance career and family, often with hilarious results)

            Finally, while most of the characters present have tastefully chosen to just have a glass of champagne (though Hagar has clearly opted for a nice, foamy PBR), Snuffy Smith has brought a big ol’ jug of three X moonshine.  Sure, it seems funny now, but wait until later on tonight when he gets all wasted and makes a crude pass at Sally Forth before collapsing in a smelly, drunken, white trashy heap in the foyer.  Okay, on second thought, that might be kind of funny after all.

            ACHTUNG, MEINE KLIENEN BLOG AFFEN: the following blog may contain 80s club music and brief scenes of me dancing to it.  As such, it is not recommended for the faint of heart or anybody with any rhythm whatsoever.  For all the rest of you though, read on, and experience the complete and utter horror of, “Ben Goes to a Retro 80s Dance Club!!!!!”

            Last Thursday started normally enough.  There I was, sitting in front of my computer, talking with various and sundry homies of mine.  All of a sudden and completely without warning, I got an IM from, Zardok, daughter of Wulfgar, a girl of my acquaintance informing me that she and her fiancée, Glarg the Orc-Render, who is also very much a good friend of mine (in order to protect the innocent, their names have been changed to protect them from the socially lethal uncoolness radiation of shame which my actions might otherwise be exposing them to) would being going out to an 80s dance club in Richmond later that night.  At first I was somewhat reluctant to go along, “I’m somewhat reluctant to go along,” I said.  “But Ben,” she replied, there’s gonna be dorky 80s girls there!”  And of course, there are few things more loathsome to me than missing out on the chance to dance with dorky 80s girls, so I relented at last.  Now, owing to my unfortunate lack of hammerpants, I don’t really have anything that looks very 80s, except for my Viva La Reagan shirt, which somehow didn’t seem right for the occasion (if only I had one of those Ayatollah Assahola shirts that everyone was wearing back in the day).  Not to be discouraged however, I girded on my finest dancing clothes.  I donned my stylish yet edgy teacupmammoths.com t-shirt (only $9, buy one today!) and found my post-apocalyptic Mel Gibson death boots (which never fail to add like, 10 points to my dance skills), donned my Roman Gladiator Watchband of Fury, and put the +7 Chinese Magic Jade Monkey Amulet of Luck that my sister got for me in China in my pocket, assuming that it could only bolster my move-busting abilities (I was not to be disappointed in this, as we shall see).  Also, I wore pants.

            Richmond, as befits a city of its awesomeness, has a veritable plethora of neighborhoods which sociologists frequently describe as “really sketchy”, and last night I think we drove through most of them in our poorly planned quest for the 80s.  Happily though, we eventually found our way there, and within a few minutes, were surveying the scene.  Now, as happened to be the case, my fellow club-goers had some other friends to talk to there at first, so I found myself momentarily left to my own devices, and accordingly set out for the dance floor.  Now, I do not do a whole lot of clubbing, and except for the occasional homecoming dance in high school, haven’t really spent a great deal of time on the dance floor, and at first I felt some trepidation about just wading out there and trying to dance.  But then, it struck me like duffel bag full of yams being thrown from the international space station:  nobody else there could dance either!  Indeed, as I looked around with a somewhat keener eye, I beheld naught but an endless sea of completely rhythm-deprived dorky white people kind of flailing around like a bucket full of electric sea weasels (The Electric Sea Weasels, might I add, would make a totally sweet name for a band).  Heartened by this epiphany, decided that the time had come for me to at last unleash my dance moves.

            Now, it happens to be the case that the Good Lord saw fit, in his infinite wisdom, to equip me with but two different dances; one being the White Guy Shuffle, which is that universal dance that all white guys do when they’re thrown by some cruel circumstance onto a dance floor.  I’m pretty sure its actually genetic or something, like how when a cat into the bathtub, he instinctively remembers how to swim, just before he instinctively remembers how to jump out of the tub and gnaw your face off.  So there I was, doing the White Guy Shuffle, feeling relatively at ease with myself there on the crowded and anonymous dance floor.  All of a sudden though, something went horribly wrong, and I found that everyone around me had momentarily backed off a little, thus giving me a bit of room to move around in.  This is where it gets bad.

            Remember how I said I know two dances, and one of them is the White Guy Shuffle?  Well, I chose that moment to do the other one.  For some weird and mysterious reason that always hits me at dances eventually, I did The Ben.  What, you may ask, is The Ben?  It sort of defies human description, but I’m gonna give it a try anyway.  Once it started, I didn’t really notice much until it was all over and the survivors fled the building, so most of what follows is based upon the testimony of those who were brave enough to watch.  Where shall I begin?  Okay, imagine that I’m some badass computer guy from the Matrix, and I can move faster than humanly possible, and imagine that at this same time, my pants are full of weasels and silly putty, and now imagine that my Uber-fast pants-weasel silly putty dance is strangely in sync with “99 Luft Balloons”.  It was like an atomic bomb had been dropped in the middle of the dance floor; people instinctively recoiled in amazement and terror, and when it was all over, the living would envy the dead.  Seriously, everybody around me stopped to stare.  It was as if Godzilla had walked into Tokyo, but instead of making balloon animals out of commuter trains and breathing radiation breath all over the place (I myself had tanked up on Altoids not a hour before all this), he suddenly stopped kicking over building and had a seizure.  It was that bad.  According to those who lived to tell the tale it was tough to say whether people were mostly impressed or horrified, so I’m just gonna go with saying that they were all completely weirded out.  In short, it was totally freakin’ awesome.

            Alas, no dorky 80s girls saw fit to dance with me that night, but most of them didn’t run screaming into the street like they used to back in middle school, so I counted it to be a decided improvement and went along on my merry way.  Anyway, the moral of the story is, um, I dunno, kids, don’t do drugs, and don’t watch me dance either, because in terms of messing you up, they’re probably about the same.

            If you were to walk down the street and randomly ask people who their favorite astrophysicist is, most of them would say Stephen Hawking.  Okay, maybe some of them would say it was Albert Einstein, or Alf, or Donald Rumsfeld, but Stephen Hawking is still clearly in the top four.  Anyways, the thing is, if he’s so totally brilliant (and you know he is because he was on Star Trek once) how come he just rolls around all the time in that dinky little souped up wheelchair?  I mean, I’m sure he could probably build a toaster oven that’s smarter than both houses of Congress put together, so how come he’s riding around in Lincoln Continental of the wheelchair world?  The answer, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, is that there’s actually more to this situation than meets the eye.  But what could really be behind this bizarre contradiction between the inherent awesomeness of Stephen Hawking and the comparative lametude of his only modestly pimped out ride?

            After puzzling over this quandary, I think I’ve come to the only conclusion that fits with the facts available, which is of course, that Stephen Hawking, much like Captain Picard, is in fact Professor X, brilliant telepath and leader of a team of mutants who fight evil and other severely uncool things.  I’ll bet the he hates spending all day rolling around in that wheelchair of his doing PBS specials and sneaker endorsements, and as soon as he gets back to his fortress at night, he hops out and either puts on his powered exoskeleton or gets into some kind of awesome looking hoverchair that has like, a mini-fridge, and a DVD player, and some photon torpedoes, and maybe even a Mr. Coffee (except, since he’s in England, it would be Mr. Tea, which is like Mr. Coffee, but with more gold chains and a mohawk).  And then, I bet he has some kind of totally sweet underground tunnel thing that takes him to his secret base at the center of the Earth where, with his council of awesomeness (including such super-powered mutants as Bob Denver, Bob Dole, Wolverine and LeVar Burton) where he works tirelessly behind the scenes in all global affairs working ever for the good of mankind.

            Stephen Hawking is also probably just putting on an act when he talks like he’s just another world-famous physicist.  Like, when he’s down with all his mutant homies in the danger room, he’s always saying stuff like, “I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum,” or “Christmas came early this year, and Santa just brought you a punch in the face,” or maybe even, “Autobots, transform and roll out!” because as cool as he is, Stephen Hawking is not above using someone else’s battle cry if it works really well.  And Stephen Hawking and his four mutants probably each have a different ring of elemental power, (Bob Dole of course, has Heart) and by their powers combined, they could summon some benevolent nature spirit, but since Captain Planet is in rehab right now, the best they can probably hope for is Ralph Nader with a green mullet (the haircut, not the fish, unless it’s not an exclusive choice and he can have both, cause if you think anyone is gonna stand their ground when a green-mulleted fish-swinging Ralph Nader comes after them, you haven’t spent as much time out living on the streets as I have).

            And of course, they’d all travel around in some crazy tank that they got a the Thundercats’ garage sale, after Lion-o got taken away for abusing Snarf and Panthro finally got a full time gig as a jazz performer for those stupid robo-koalas that 3^rd Earth is infested with.  And maybe once in a while, they fight a robeast, just to keep things interesting.

            So yeah, next time someone tells you that Stephen Hawking is just another stuffy old white guy scientist, you make sure you set them straight on the subject.  Also, make sure you point out that he is totally the world champion when it comes to doing the robot dance.

            If there’s one thing that always comes to mind when you mention Little Orphan Annie (aside from showtunes that, when you sing them, will makes all your friends shun you like an Amish man with a cable modem and a zoot suit), it’s the fact that she’s something of an anatomical anomaly, insomuch as she has all white eyes.  Now, this has always seemed kind of creepy to me, but that’s beside the point.  What does matter though, is that this particular affliction of hers is extremely rare, being confined, in fact, to just three different individuals in the course of human history.  They are of course, Little Orphan Annie herself, Raiden the thunder god from Mortal Kombat, and Geordi LaForge, chief engineer of the U.S.S. Enterprise N.C.C. 1701-D (the very fact that I knew all that pretty much brands me as a geek for the rest of my life, but I think I already crossed that particular Rubicon of geekdom when I wrote an entire blog about the secret life of Snarf).  Now, I find it to be frankly incredible that there are only three people and/or thunder gods in the world who suffer from this particular ailment, without there being some kind of a connection.  There are a number of possible explanations for how these three very different people came to be united by a common trait like this, from all of them taking part in an ill-fated experimental contact lens trial to Little Orphan Annie going mad and biting the other two of them in some fevered ragamuffin frenzy (Ragamuffin Frenzy, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band).  When all is said and done though, I think that neither of these explanations makes any sense at all, leaving us with but a single option as to the common origin of these fabled and infamous three.

            That of course is this: they’re all siblings who were born to a poor family of Jell-O ranchers on the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana.  Every day they’d all gather on the front porch of their plywood gazebo, playing harmonica, eating moonpies, and building a small Thunderdome entirely out of dead squirrels and RC Cola cans.  There in their bastion of domestic bliss, they all grew up together, singing dirt chanties and carving possums into stylish yet modest swimwear.  Indeed, the three of them could have gone on indefinitely like that, dancing with catfish and turning marmots in to marmalade.  Alas, such an idyllic way of life can rarely be expected to endure forever, and this situation was no different.  Bill Cosby Industries bought out the family’s Jell-O farm, and the three children had to go their separate ways and try to make a name for themselves in the world, while sending back all they could spare to their poverty-stricken parents, Mumm-Ra and Imelda Marcos, who were living in a 24 hour pancake emporium with a generous all you can eat deal.

            Little Orphan Annie, who had always wondered why her parents had named her that instead of just “Annie” decided one of the many professional cheese wranglers who were making their way out West at the time, helping to meet the ever-increasing demand for tough and courageous men and women who could drive the vast herds of cheese across the Great Plains from the spawning pits of Nevada to the slicing yards of St. Louis (the patron saint of cheese, particularly Cheeses of Nazareth).  For many seasons Little Orphan Annie (who was getting really tired of trying to explain her most uncalled for name to everyone she met) drove her charge, a snarling horde of Goudas halfway across the nation, and might well have gone on indefinitely, were it not for the Great Cheese Shortage of aught seven, when a terrible blight struck the cheese herds and forced many cheese wranglers to head into the big city in search of other employment.  Unfortunately, there were no jobs to be had for a girl with creepy all white demon eyes and Little Orphan Annie had to start stealing car stereos and selling them on Ebay to get by.  Happily, she eventually met Dick Cheney’s grandfather, Daddy Warbucks, and now rules over a media empire of great snazzitude and awesomosity.

            Geordi LaForge had a much more challenging road ahead of him, for as soon as he left home, he was captured by slavers and forced to take part in an epic miniseries that people still watch today when they feel like they ought to see something important.  This miniseries is of course, Ken Burns’ An American Tragedy: The Disco Era.  After this though, Geordi made his way to public television, where he got a job as the host of Reading Rainbow, while going to night school and taking correspondence courses to become a certified starship engineer.  At last the break he had been waiting for came his way, when his old friend Worf came by for a dramatic reading of “Goodnight Moon” and mentioned in passing that the starship Enterprise needed more weird people on it, and the chief engineer spot was open.  So, donning a big funny looking hair clip to hide the whiteulosity of his eyes, Geordi LaForge was at last living his dream, to be best friends with an android and work on a spaceship run by the leader of the X-Men.

            The youngest of the three, little Raiden, knew all along that if he was going to make anything of himself, he was going to need a good education, so he got a part time job as a human refrigerator magnet, while taking classes at the local community college to earn his two year Be Some Kind of Ancient Japanese Thunder God or Something Degree.  It was the best three dollars he ever spent.  After graduating, Raiden made a name for himself with the publication of his classic book on growing up, “Are you there God, it’s me Raiden?” which told kids absolutely nothing of value, but was made into a Jerry Bruckheimer film some years later anyway.  When he heard about the upcoming video game, Mortal Kombat though, Raiden knew he had to have a part in it, and so, after beating out Matt Damon and Secretary of State Madeline Albright, he got the role, the royalties from which continue to support him to this very day.

            The three of them still keep in touch now and then, and they hold a big family reunion every year back on their ancestral farm, which they got back from Bill Cosby after an epic battle on top of a flaming Nazi dirigible.  For the most part though, they just keep on doing their own thing, although recent rumors suggest that they’ll all be taking part in next year’s big Broadway revival of “Alf!”the musical.